


No Hero's Journey

by greygerbil



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-05
Updated: 2017-07-20
Packaged: 2018-03-05 13:48:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 16
Words: 40,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3122483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greygerbil/pseuds/greygerbil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A randomly distributed boon like the Anchor has some serious disadvantages. What if the Chosen One you're stuck with is a dirty Carta thug who would rather be anywhere else than this battlefield? Since Edric Cadash has the Anchor on his hand, he's going to have to start becoming something he was really never meant to be. On the way, he hopes to inspire Varric, the resident expert on heroes, to do more than just tell his story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is written for a prompt on the kinkmeme that asked for unconventional Heralds - the kind that everyone would look at and go "yeah, we're probably doomed". The first chapter is a little heavy on dialogue from the game, that'll change from the next one on.

_Bring forth the sacrifice._

Edric swallowed hard and tried his best to pretend he hadn’t heard that. The Shades he could handle. The green ghosts were creepy, but manageable. When they found that group of scouts up on top of the hill he’d heard something scream and seen a tall, pole-limbed thing from the corner of his eyes. Pentaghast and Tethras had done a good job keeping whatever it had been at bay, though. He himself had been busy making sure his own ass wasn’t eaten by a Shade, so he couldn’t take a closer look and didn’t feel sorry for it. 

The dwarf had never dealt with shit like this before, all this magicker nonsense. However, he’d spent half his life in crumbling tunnels and badly secured mines searching for lyrium. Some of the scars in his face had been left by darkspawn stragglers. You didn’t get to be squeamish in Orzammar. As long as it reeled when he bashed his shield in its face and hurt when he hit it with a sword, it didn’t make him flinch (much).

This shit was beyond him, though. A voice like iron spikes poking the inside of his brain, prying on something he both remembered and didn’t, how did that make sense? Sure, he’d not been jumping for joy about the green hole in his own hand. The ones the bald elf had had him mend had been terrifying to look at, too. This thing, this giant green thorny monstrosity with ribbons of reality swirling around it that occupied the middle of the destroyed Temple, though – he couldn’t begin to imagine how he could fix that. It couldn’t be as easy as waving at it again, could it?

“The rift looks like some sort of fucked-up, exploded crystal up close,” he told Tethras, just to drown out the echo of words that seemed way too familiar – _keep the sacrifice still_ – in his head. Tethras was the only one good to talk to so far, anyway, although Edric didn’t understand why he hadn’t fucked off and gotten himself to safety when Pentaghast offered him the chance. The elf, Solas, knew too much about all of this to be trustworthy. Seeker Pentaghast would’ve chopped off Edric’s head if it wasn’t for that thing in his palm.

However, Tethras wasn’t listening to him this time. Turning his eyes from the green glow to look at the wall that Tethras stared at, Edric was greeted by shimmering red gems growing out of the rough-hewn stone like tumours, like...

“Red lyrium?” He stared. “Andraste’s ass, we heard about that. Bosses thought it was just a rumour.”

“Good on them. It’s evil. Don’t touch it!” Tethras said, pale around the nose.

Between the other dwarf looking like he was about to throw up and Seeker Pentaghast nervously craning her neck to locate the source of the voice with an expression on her face that said she’d start hacking at the empty air pretty soon, not losing his shit was getting progressively more difficult for Edric.

Still, he had to go on, right? If he tried to run, these Chantry people would cut him down. He lowered his head like a bull ready to charge and trudged on, not looking at the glowing green crack in reality. However, as he descended a stone slope, his hand began spitting sparks again and a spasm racked up his arm, hot like lava.

_Someone help me!_

_What’s going on here?_

“Wait, isn’t that my voice?!”

Maybe he’d just been imagining it. Most of his thoughts went along the lines of _what is happening_ since he’d woken up with a hole to the Fade in his hand. Pentaghast stared at him, looking murderous as usual.

“Most Holy called out to you, but...”

The green thing crackled again and suddenly they were looking at pictures that seemed made out of smoke, half-real. Something about the dark figure bowing over the bound woman tugged at his brain with hooks and then he saw himself...

_We have an intruder. Slay the dwarf._

Pentaghast was shouting at him as the vision vanished, but Edric couldn’t her hear through blood pumping in his ears. She probably asked questions or hurled accusations, but he was busy digging into his head to get more, he had to have seen more... 

“I don’t remember,” he said to himself.

Solas had been speaking to Tethras for a while now, too, but Edric hadn’t listened to him either. He just caught the tail-end of his sentence.

“... the rift can be opened and then sealed properly and safely.”

That woke him up right quick. Edric gaped at him.

“We’re going to open it up so demons can fall out of it?! That sounds like a blighted stupid plan!”

“I’m afraid it’s the only one we have. We won’t be able to avoid attention from the other side...”

Edric shook his head in dumb terror. He’d seen the shit that came out of the small cracks. What would climb out of this thing? He wanted to repair the hole in the sky, sure, but he couldn’t very well do that if a demon had bitten his head off.

“Well, we can’t just leave it like this,” Tethras said. The green light bathed his face; the stark, wavering shadows it cast seemed to possess a life of their own.

Swearing under his breath, Edric nodded his head and raised his hand to the rift.

A stream of energy flowed out of him and attached itself to the thing. Edric didn’t think he’d ever get used to that feeling. It was like being an inbetween piece in a construction – like the pulley that led the rope so someone could drag a lyrium crate out of a hole.

“Stand ready!” Pentaghast shouted to the archers circling what was probably about to become a battlefield. Edric tried to remember them; they did have back-up this time, yes. Even if the rift vomited a dozen Shades, the things couldn’t kill all of them, could they?

He closed his eyes briefly and opened them again at a snapping sound. A fierce blaze of light illuminated the stone arena. When it took form, Edric screamed, but his voice was drowned out by thunderous laughter rolling out of a sharp-toothed, giant maw.

The thing towered over them all. It was made out of hard plates of iron or stone with sharp edges and beady little eyes that all seemed focused on Edric. Its hands were claws, its head adorned with long horns. The only thing Edric could liken it to was an ogre, but he’d swear that thing had to be bigger. He’d never seen an ogre, anyhow. They didn’t come so close to the surface, not without another Blight. His mates Rikard and Garok had claimed they’d fought one in the abandoned thaig of House Roghar, but they had been full of shit, everyone had known that. 

No mere duster would survive taking on something this size.

“Pride demon?” Tethras called, running with his crossbow in hand to circle the monstrosity.

Edric was rooted to the spot. He should have charged forward with Pentaghast or at least attempted to cover the mage and the rogue, but he just stood there, staring into its many eyes.

“Yes, and a strong one!” Solas gave back, keeping up with Tethras. “You must weaken the rift before we can hurt it!”

It took Edric a moment to realise the mage was speaking to him. Right. Weaken the breach. Rift. Thing. Did he just have to point at it again? As he lifted his hand, it shook in front of his eyes, but everything sort of did. His vision was going smaller and darker at the edges. Small flickers of green slipped between his fingers, but nothing happened. For some reason he couldn’t breathe. His knees were about to give out.

“The rift, Master Cadash!”

“It’s not working,” he mumbled, but he doubted the words ever reached the others. Like he was trying to get a mechanical clock to work, he shook his hand, but it did nothing. The red hair on his arms stood. Icy fear crawled up his back like a corpse’s fingers. Pentaghast was slashing at the demon’s leg with enough force to separate a man’s neck from his body. He could see the impact of her stroke shake her own arm as her sword glanced off the demon’s hide.

A whip made of pure light suddenly snapped into the demon’s hand. Pentaghast was thrown backwards onto the ground as it struck her shoulders. Edric was breathing fast and hard, but still no air seemed to fill his lungs.

“Chuckles, I’ll distract it! Go see what’s taking him!”

Like a spectre, the mage suddenly appeared next to him in an icy cloud. Edric felt invisible fractions of ice on his face. That woke him a little. Eyes wide with wordless horror, he stared up at Solas.

“Master Cadash, you have to concentrate!”

“I’m...” Edric whispered, cursing his own lame tongue. “I...”

Long fingers closed around his armoured wrist. Solas steadied his arm. “Look at the rift!”

But Edric still couldn’t tear his gaze from the demon. Its steps shook the earth under his feet. Tethras had run up to it with only two daggers in his hands. He danced around paws coming down on him like rockfalls, but though his strikes were fast, they were as futile as Pentaghast’s. Finally, the back of the demon’s heand caught Tethras in the face and threw him several feet across the ground like a nug-leather ball. It’d have stepped on him if it wasn’t for Pentaghast screaming a wordless threat. She rushed in, her shield held high.

“Concentrate!”

They were good fighters, and each ten times as brave as him, but without Edric, they’d be ground to the dirt. He held on to whatever little of him didn’t seem liquid with fear and closed his eyes. There was that pull again and the heat running up into his arm.

The rift crackled and the demon groaned.

Two more shades added to the mix weren’t anyone’s idea of a good time, but Edric suddenly remembered how to move his legs. At least these things were only twice as tall as he was. At least he’d seen them go down before. After a spell that shot past his ear, one shattered into in chunks of ice as he rammed his shield against it. Another fell with Edric’s blade ten inches in its stomach.

By that point, the pride demon had lost two eyes to Tethras’ bolts and had a gaping wound in its plated stomach. It could be touched. It could be _killed_. When he ran to attack the pride demon, he shook head to toe and if he hadn’t worn leather gloves, his sword would have slipped out of his sweat-wet grip, but he was fighting.

For the life of him, Edric couldn’t say how long it went on. Bolts stuck out of the demon like it was a pincushion, blades bit at its hard skin, spells froze and burned and electrocuted, and yet the thing laughed and struck and stomped its clawed feet. Just when he couldn’t feel his arms anymore and blood was running in a steady stream into his eyes, the demon fell to its knees and then toppled with a deafening crash. He was still staring as Tethras jostled him.

“Close the rift!” The other dwarf shouted into his ear.

This time, Edric didn’t need help. The energy stream was strong enough to damn near rip his arm from the joint. When the green light exploded, the resulting blinding light didn’t fade until, suddenly, complete darkness enveloped him.


	2. Chapter 2

Edric’s head was spinning as he stepped out of Chantry. Lots of long-legs he’d met today – he wondered if he could remember all the names until tomorrow. He better should. Chances were he wasn’t getting out of here yet, since the clouds were still glowing green with energy that oozed from the Fade like mold was growing on the world.

He squinted in the bright of day. His eyes had to get used to the snow-white of Haven after standing mutely by as Pentaghast – or Seeker Cassandra, as she was called by most –, Cullen, Sister Leliana and Josephine argued back and forth about the merits and virtues of mages and Templars. Eventually they came to the conclusion that it didn’t matter because they had “no leader, no numbers and no Chantry support”, and no one would speak to them anyway.

Solemn words and big old books aside, Edric counted thirty-six winters now and he knew when an operation was destined to go to shit. This here had as much chance to make it through alright as a nug’s skull had between a hammer and an anvil. If he could, Edric would be jumping ship, but thanks to the hole in his hand, there was no way they’d let him go – even though they’d already proven it didn’t work on the blighted Breach and it had damn dear killed him twice now. Just how likely was it he’d cheat death a third time?

Taking a deep breath of cold mountain air, he considered his next step. He’d gotten a whole shopping list of tasks from the humans that held his leash, none of which he’d any idea how to even start with. However, when he overheard two passing soldiers talking of going to the tavern, his immediate goal became much clearer.

He didn’t have a copper in his pockets, but the barmaid’s eyes grew big when she spotted the mark on his hand and she immediately put a tankard of ale down in front of him.

Edric climbed onto the human-sized chair, finding himself with legs dangling off of the edge of the seat. Unlike the large stone Chantry, the tavern was pleasantly warm. A fire crackled and the smell of damp clothes, sweat and a brown-coloured stew with chunks of something unidentifiably boiling in a dented pot mixed in the heavy air. A minstrel was singing a slow, sad song. It would’ve almost been cozy if it wasn’t for everyone looking at him like he was a griffon with golden wings.

Free drinks were probably the only good thing about this particular new folly. When he had woken up after apparently days unconscious, humans and elves had littered the wayside in front of the hut he laid in, talking in respectfully hushed whispers. Even the Seeker, who hadn’t seemed to him like someone who believed in fairytales, had claimed that the Maker had sent him. Either he was going mad or everyone else was.

“Mind if I sit with you?”

Brooding over his drink, Edric hadn’t seen Tethras walk up to him. To be frank he’d heard enough for a week or two and while he found Tethras more tolerable than the rest of the ragtag group, he was still suicidally selfless, considering he still hadn’t made a run for it. Everyone had their weaknesses, though, and Edric’s happened to be pretty blonds, so he shrugged.

“Suit yourself, salroka.”

The corner of Tethras’ mouth twitched. He sat down opposite of him. “Haven’t been called that in a while.”

“Tethras, then? Reckon a Deshyr don’t spend much time ‘round our lowly kind.”

Edric had remembered where he’d heard Tethras’ name before. He’d been working the Free Marches for years and after a while, even his pay grade learned the names of Merchant Guild families so they knew who to watch out for. Bartrand Tethras, who must’ve been some relative of Varric Tethras’, had run a tight ship. Even after his disappearance the family still commanded a lot respect.

“Varric is fine. You’re right, I don’t talk that much to the Carta and most of your colleagues don’t consider me friends. House Tethras doesn’t dabble in the lyrium trade. I’ve more dealings with _human_ criminals,” Varric said with a charming smile.

Edric didn’t bother to protest the truth. The Cadash family was no horde of saints. “You’re the head of your House, right?”

“Regrettably, yes.” Varric blew an errant strand of hair out of his face. “I’m better on the sneakier side of things. Urchins waiting in every alley, pretend-drunken informants lending an ear in every bar, things like that.”

“ _You’re_ responsible for the Tethras’ family’s network? Why aren’t you the Inquisition’s spymaster?” Edric took a gulp of the thick ale. “I remember my cousins used to tear their beards out trying to sneak shit past your folks in Kirkwall and it never worked.”

Laughing, Varric waved to the barmaid – Flissa, he called her – for another drink. “Well, thank you. I know Kirkwall like I know my crossbow: no one can get it to work for him better than I do. Our Sister Nightingale has a great eye for the grande scale, though. She doesn’t care as much about her people, not when she can’t allow herself to. I always baby sit them and worry about their families... I’d not be half as good.” Varric shrugged and thanked the barmaid with a smile as she placed a cup in front of him. “Anyway, now that the Seeker’s out of earshout, I came here to ask how you’re holding up. You’ve had quite a few exciting days – from most wanted criminal in all the southern lands to the armies of the faithful...”

A thread of real gratefulness stirred somewhere in Edric’s chest. Varric’s tone showed conversational but honest interest in his well-being and he fancied it had nothing to do with that blasted hole in his hand. You didn’t get to many people who gave a shit about your well-being in Edric’s line of work and certainly not here, where he was basically just something unfortunately attached to the mark.

“You can say that again,” he grunted into his drink. “Maker’s balls, I still don’t know what’s really going on.”

“Understandable.” Varric swirled the liquid in his cup. “That pride demon seemed to shake you up.”

He grunted, unsure what to say. The only reason he hadn’t pissed his trousers in that fight was because he’d been too busy trying not to faint. Still, it wasn’t a moment he’d wanted to be remembered for. Edric put some pride in his fighting skills; he really didn’t have much else going for him.

“It was a blighted demon the size of a house!” He snapped. “Why weren’t _you_ afraid?!”

“I ran with the Champion of Kirkwall for a long while. Demons, dragons, rock wraiths, statues coming to life... I thought I’d seen it all. Then the sky opened.” A frown knitting his brow, Varric tasted a sip from his drink. “I just wanted to say, you’ll probably have to get used to that weird crap. We’re going to see a whole lot more of it, much as I wish it were different.”

Before Edric had a chance to answer, a young human woman caught his eye. She was standing by a table closeby and stared at them a little less subtly than the rest. When he looked her way, she quickly turned to her neighbour and emitted a high-pitched giggle. Varric glanced over his shoulder at the noise and grinned.

“What was that about?” Edric asked, voice lowered slightly.

“Why, the Herald of Andraste payed her attention. It’s exciting,” Varric said with a chuckle.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

The tattoo on his face – cheeks and hollows of his eyes darkened, a black shape on his forehead and another on his nose and five lines crossing his mouth like threads – was supposed to intimidate. Parts of it were covered by his tangled rust-coloured beard the same colour as his short hair. Twenty years after he had gotten the ink, more than a dozen scars criss-crossed his face and made his clay brown skin look like ripped old leather. With that, his dull granite-coloured eyes and a nose crooked after being broken the third time, Edric had never had any illusions about his own looks. The sudden attention was just another side effect of the whole Herald bullshit.

“The people here are all full of sod. I need another drink...”

He signed at Flissa, who was eager to bring him the next mug without question. Edric ignored the thoughful gaze Varric gave him.

“So why are you still here?” Edric asked, after wiping ale from his beard with the back of his broad, callous hand.

“I’m as selfish as the next guy, but even I can’t ignore a hole in the world,” Varric said. “As long as you can make use of Bianca and me, we’ll be here.”

Just as he’d guessed, Varric was another do-gooder. Great.

“Don’t see how that’s my decision.”

“Whether you want the power to make that decision might not be your decision.” Mug still in hand, the dwarf raised from his chair. “I promised to compare notes with the Nightingale. I’ll see you around. Don’t fall over drunk, morale is low enough as it is.”

Even though Varric’s word left him with a bad taste in his mouth, Varric’s smile was really pretty to look at, Edric thought; it seemed slightly mischievous and a little worried.

“Atrast tunsha, salroka,” Varric said before he walked away.

*

The following days were a whirl of strange incidents that left Edric more bewildered every new evening. For some reason, he seemed to be the one who had to say ‘let’s go here’ or ‘let’s do that’. Why anyone trusted him with this, he really didn’t know. Edric didn’t.

Compared to that frozen collection of huts called Haven, the Hinterlands weren’t that bad. It didn’t rain more than half the time, which for Ferelden was decent enough. Listening to Varric find colourful new curses for every outgrown root and puddle of mud was fun; so was watching Vivienne, an Orlesian court lickspittle he’d picked up on the show-runners’ advice, bear with graceful indignity that he had them wade through shallow rivers and climb on rocks.

Other than that, reasons for optimism were sparse. Josephine was desperately trying to explain away his plethora of criminal connections, making him feel in a very well-mannered roundabout way how much she wished literally anyone else were in his shoes. Cassandra talked his ear off about their duty to everyone and their grandmother and obviously got increasingly worried with Edric’s lack of enthusiasm. Solas and Vievienne barely hid the fact that they thought Edric was a blithering idiot behind jabs that Edric was still clever enough to understand, thank you. Also, behind every rock and tree seemed to be a hole in the world that puked demons.

In the lyrium trade, he had met both mages and Templars. Half the apostates clan Cadash sold to seemed to dabble in blood magic. Others were apparently squeaky clean, but it didn’t make a damn difference to Edric what they used to cause tidal waves and sunder the earth. Despite all their pissing and moaning about ‘why not lock up everyone with a sword?’, they uniformly put their heads in the sand when told that a fourteen year old that could set a farm house on fire with a flick of his wrist and make a pact with a demon on a whim was bloody well a threat to everyone around him. The Templars weren’t better, either. How stupid did you have to be to drink lyrium on purpose when you couldn’t even make it into a real weapon, likes the mages? He knew why the Chantry was doing it, of course, but it seemed like the worst thing to get someone hooked on. Wasn’t like you could always pinpoint the exact moment someone went lyrium crazy. They had plenty of time to cause damage with their growing paranoia; or maybe you could pinpoint it really well, and then it was because a Templar had painted the walls of some Circle red with the blood of twenty mage children in a delusional rage.

Barking mad and more dangerous than a herd of angry brontos, the lot of them.

Edric had had to laugh when it came to light that they’d have to uproot a Templar camp _and_ an apostate hideout in the Hinterlands. He wondered if he could keep up that strategy: just kick everyone until they agreed to stop fighting.

When they weren’t battling stragglers of the civil war, which was the most comprehensible part of Edric’s job so far, they were collecting minerals and herbs and trying to map out the area. Here and there, one of his companions claimed that they saw something especially interesting or historically valuable and they marked it for him so he could dutifully trudge over and make sure everyone knew the Inquisition had been here.

Edric was just attempting to drive the golden rod of an Inquisition banner into the stony ground with Varric’s help when he chanced to look up at it, an old question entering back into his mind.

“Why is it an eye, anyway?”

“What?” Varric asked, distracted. With the blunt blade of an old dagger, he was trying to dig into the earth and shift away some of the bigger pieces of rubble so they could position the rod.

“The Inquisition banners. Take your fingers away.”

When Varric had done so, Edric used all his strength to hammer the pole in with one, two, three short bursts of strength. Eventually something gave with a crack and he could ram the banner into the ground.

“You have a lot of finesse, Herald,” Varric said with a faint grin.

“Don’t call me that. Let’s fix it with stones.”

While they accumulated the heap, Varric also looked up.

“I would assume it’s because they are known as the Seekers of Truth, right? Then the sun for the Chantry and the sword because everyone including Templars soil their breeches when a Seeker kicks the door down. Apparently they used to be even worse in the days before the Chantry, if you can believe that after having met Cassandra...”

“There was an Inquisition before the Chantry?”

He must’ve said something pretty stupid, which was no novelty these days, because Varric stopped heaping up stones, his dirt-stained leather gloves resting atop a rain-wet boulder.

“Playing the modern version of the Inquisition of Old is kind of the point of everything we’re doing,” he said slowly.

Ancestors, Edric was getting tired of that tone. Everyone seemed to use it with him. Sounded like they thought he was a daft, lazy kid. Why was he expected to know all this? No one had explained it to him. He hadn’t been given a choice to join, and if he left, he’d be killed by those who thought he’d caused the explosion. Edric had thought he was kept around to knit rifts close, not lead the main force of this whole thing. And after all, he hadn’t understood everything the heads of clan Cadash had done, either. He had just been there to carry a sword and a shield and Edric had been good at _that_ job. You wouldn’t have put a pigherd in an Orlesian ballroom and expect him to dance with the Queen, would you? It wasn’t his fault he sucked at saving the world, he could have told them that up front, but no one was bloody asking!

“Does it matter?!” He snapped at Varric. “I know everyone hates us and that we need to close the Breach. Is there anything I’m missing, anything at all that would make a fucking difference?!”

Edric threw another stone on their heap with enough force to have the ones around it roll off. The banner slanted and would have fallen if Varric hadn’t caught it and set it straight again. Cursing under his breath, Edric pushed the stones back in place.

“There’s some books on the Inquisition back in Haven,” Varric said in a conciliatory tone.

“Good for the books. I can’t read.”

“I could teach you,” Varric offered.

Perhaps he should have said yes. Staring at the War Table and demanding further explanations on mission reports he couldn’t decipher would only work so long. However, he was tired and cold and hungry, the arm with the Anchor in it ached up to his elbow, and maybe he’d die before sundown in a fight against some insane bastard in the asscrack of Ferelden.

“I didn’t ask.”

He’d often wished he could read in the past, if only to have something to do on long evenings. Shit, he was pretty sure he’d even leafed through some of Varric’s books before, now that he’d seen a few worn copies among the Inquisition soldiers. They were popular in the Marcher cities, where he’d worked for the last decade. However, at this moment, learning to read just seemed like one more thing he could try and fail at to show everyone once more he didn’t fit this Herald mould. Edric turned his back on Varric and looked down the slope of the hill to Solas and Cassandra, who were plucking Elfroot. It was better than facing the author’s displeased expression for much longer.

“Let’s go,” Edric said. Because he was in this hole and he might as well dig deeper, he added: “I doubt anything written in some dusty tome about what human blighters did a thousand years ago will help us. I never needed nothing written in books my whole life. They’re a waste of time.”

If he could have found a more deserving target than Varric for the spite and frustration that been building up in him, it might have felt a little better.

As they trudged through another endless quagmire of moss, sallow grass and soggy brown leaves, filled with corpses clad in robes and armour alike, towards a broken ruin, Edric resolved to ask Varric to tell him some tale of the old Inquisition in the evening. It was supposed to be a peace offering – show Varric that he wasn’t as much of a son of a bitch after all and didn’t think he had all the answers. However, they were ambushed as soon as they’d built their campfire and spent half the night searching for a safe place to rest, where everyone but the designated guard fell asleep in an instant. After that, the silence between them had lasted too long.

Varric regarded him with a much cooler gaze now, but Edric tried not to take it too hard. Varric would have been a good friend to have, but Edric couldn’t be the man Varric wanted. Edric felt that in the end, he was just one of the first of thousands who would all end up deeply disappointed with their Maker-sent Herald.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Salroka = friend (among lower class dwarves)  
> Atrast tunsha = formal farewell


	3. Chapter 3

“Are you quite sure this is the right way?”

Edric didn’t bother answering Vivienne. He was concentrating on not tumbling down the steep path of slippery, rain-wet earth and rubble as they made their way over another grassy hillside. Calenhad’s Foothold stood against the washed-out blue sky in the distance, so he knew they were at least going in vaguely the direction he’d wanted.

The sound of steel clashing and the smell of smouldering damp wood created by fire spells singing trees soon interrupted the journey. It was only a handful of combatants this time around. Edric had gotten used to worse skirmishes and the Templars and rebel mages were quickly dispatched. He had a brief moment to contemplate the face of a Templar whose helmet had rolled off to the side after Edric had almost sawed his head off. He couldn’t’ve been older than seventeen. The stump of his neck stuck out of the iron armour looking comically undersized for the bulk of metal. At that age, Edric had been fighting for years, so he shouldn’t feel that twinge of regret. Must be his years catching up with him. Surviving long enough to become a proper sentimental old fool was probably not in the cards, though.

“The door over there opened when the fighting started. Curious.”

With a shake of his head, Edric turned his gaze towards a small wooden hut Solas was indicating.

“We better check if they’re alright. Or enemies,” Varric said.

Inside the dark wooden building, they didn’t find mages or Templars or even someone hurt. Employing herself with a bundle of dried herbs hanging from the ceiling, an elven woman spared them a glance. The scent of spices filled the air.

“You want trouble, too? I’ve got nothing to take anymore.”

“We just wanted to see if you are alright,” Solas offered.

With a huff, she turned back to her herbs. Even for an elf, she looked thin, like the next gust of wind could take her off her feet. She wiped her hands on her trousers.

“‘ware the Templars. They don’t care who they kill anymore. Wager you saw it yourself, fighting out there. You did good taking care of the lot.”

“Who did they kill?” Edric asked. Seemed like that was never the wrong question these days. Everyone had lost someone.

“My husband. He was digging out a stump. They said the shovel looked like a mage’s staff, the fools. ‘Better to be safe.’” She scowled. “They took the ring I gave him our wedding day. Said it might be magic.”

Edric had had the pleasure to look at a few magic rings over the last weeks. They were usually pretty elaborate and not stuck on farmers’ fingers. “Bullshit,” he muttered.

“That’s what I thought,” she scoffed. “They just wanted the gold. It’s not much, anyway, just a simple band with a black stone worth nothing. I guess if you’ve already taken a man’s life, though, you might as well steal all he has.”

Her fingers worked on plucking dry leaves, her jawline set in a defiant line. She looked too tired, too sullen to cry. Something in Edric’s chest tightened. He could feel her pain and the useless fury like it was his own.

“When did this happen?” Edric asked.

“Last evening. They were on their way into the mountains to flush some mages out of caves. Maybe they’ll kill some innocent miners next.”

“We’ll find the bastards,” Edric said, to his own surprise. “We’ll bring the ring back to you.”

*

Originally, Edric had planned to head for Lake Calenhad to speak to some Grey Warden his advisors had dug up. Now, he turned his steps northward. It was already midday, so they’d have to hurry if they wanted to find any trace of the Templars. Problem was, of course, their unknown targets weren’t the only Templars around. Indeed, there seemed to be another bunch behind every hill.

Still, Edric didn’t slow his steps for hours. The idea that he wasn’t cutting his way through an endless stream of madmen with no clear goal was a better motivation than just trying to get from here to there on the map with as little trouble as possible. Thankfully, Templars were human, easy to grasp, unlike most demons. It wasn’t that different from fighting stragglers down in the Roads or bandits in the Marcher city alleys. He was just getting used to the fact that he wasn’t ordering around a bunch of drunken low-class mercs with whom ‘charging in head-first’ was the only strategy because they were too damn stupid for anything else. His current group had two mages, for starters, and you wouldn’t have a nug’s chance at a banquet to find those among Carta fighters, let alone some who were as good as Solas and Vivienne. Then there was Varric, who could be silent as snow and take out a rat’s eye from half a mile away.

With motivation and opportunity came willingness to get a little clever. When Edric set an ambush around a large boulder conveniently blocking an incoming Templar band’s sight, all his people obediently took their positions and actually bothered to play to their strengths. Used well, they were good enough to deserve a better commander, but Edric’s pride was rearing up for the first time. Still overwhelmed, he didn’t want to be the regrettably necessary hanger-on of the Inquisition anymore. He was a warrior, that much no one could take from him.

His sword was dripping red like the light of the sun as it vanished behind an old castle in the distance. Edric was just catching his breath, standing over another half dozen corpses, as Vivienne pulled a ring with a black stone from the folds of a Templar’s skirt and held it up to glint in the dying day’s light.

“I do believe our wild goose chase has ended.” Gracefully evading the splattered rest of someone’s bowels, Vivienne made her way over to him to hand him the ring. “Darling, is this really a good way to spend our time? I agree that this was ill done of the Templars, but we cannot solve everyone’s personal problems. A war tends to create many.”

“Maybe we should at times,” Varric said. With a bunch of bloodied bolts liberated from the corpses in hand, he returned to their side, looking up at her with his amiable smile that Edric wasn’t granted anymore. “I know that just being nice is not an argument for the court, Madame de Fer. A little kindness goes a long way with the folk out here, though, and word spreads. If the Templars demand to be put back in charge, these people will remember who helped them and their neighbours, and who was too busy waving their swords in everyone’s faces.”

Honestly, Edric had never thought of it that way. All he’d seen was a woman desperate and angry in a way that he knew much too well. However, he gravely nodded his head along anyway – no shame in appropriating someone else’s good idea. Vivienne gingerly wiped a speck of blood off her hand, considering Varric’s words with an ever so slight crease between her eyebrows.

“Still, it is a lot of effort when we don’t have an infinite amount of time.” Sighing, she glanced at a puddle of blood spreading near her foot. “I suppose we must have taken care of half a hundred Templars today,” she conceded, rubbing her hands. Residue magic sparked from her fingertips.

“Don’t seem to me like a big loss,” Edric decided.

“With any luck, it will keep them from coming here again,” Solas added. “Of course, we will have to take care of the rebel mages, too, should we meet any, or they might make this place their conveniently Templar-free home base.”

Was it really their responsibility to keep the crazies in balance? Edric couldn’t see that it made a difference for anyone whether it was Templars or mages holing up in the hills. Someone would, anyway, unless the Inquisition stationed all of their troops here, and then the fighters would just move into the woods again and make trouble there.

“It’s either deepstalkers or nugs, is it?” Edric asked Varric, rolling the ring between his fingers.

Varric nodded his head. 

“What does that mean, Master Cadash?” Solas asked.

Edric shrugged. “It’s just a thing you say – ‘cause of the mushroom gardens.”

Strapping on his shield to start their way back, Edric glanced at Varric, who got the hint and took over.

“A dwarven turn of phrase, Chuckles,” he said. “Down in the deep, nugs will eat their way through a mushroom plantation in a few days, but if you bring in the deepstalkers to chase the nugs off, the deepstalkers will destroy just about everything else in the process.”

“A battle you cannot win whether you fight or try to ignore the onslaught,” Solas translated to himself. He was leaning more heavily than usual on his staff as he walked.

“What do dwarves do about the critters, then?” Vivienne asked. Her gaze was on the horizon, which was a darkening display of all the colours of bruises.

“Not much, usually,” Edric said after a moment of consideration. “Once you got the nugs or the deepstalkers in your garden, you might as well kiss the harvest goodbye.”

“What a bleak prophecy,” Solas mused.

Edric wished he could disagree.

*

_Praise to you and the Inquisition for giving my husband justice._

The woman’s grave words still sounded in Edric’s ears as he was sitting at the camp fire that evening. He’d never gotten a thank you like that, but then again, he’d never been looking for them. Still, would be a lie to say it didn’t feel good to see that look on her face when she clutched the ring, tears held at bay by a smile.

In the light of the fire, Edric studied the gash in his hand. He had a ton and a half of scars, but this one didn’t leave any welt in his skin he could feel when he ran his thumb over it. It was a line of cold fire. He’d gotten used to the tingling crackle it emitted every now and then. Most of the time it simply looked like a bloodless cut, though. It was rather small for something that was supposed to be so important.

“What was it about this woman’s ring that got you so fired up?”

The voice came from Varric’s bedstead. He was resting on the ground. His leather duster was spread like a blanket over him. His hand always laid on his crossbow when he fell asleep, but usually he turned away in the night. Right now, he was peering past the construction of steel and scratched wood at Edric. It was the first time he’d spoken to him again without prompting since the fight they’d had.

“I dunno.” Varric waited and that patient silence forced Edric to dig deeper than he wanted. “She was all on her own. Nothing she could do about assholes in armour killing whoever they feel like. Hit close to home.”

“Where’s home?”

Edric exhaled.

“That Corporal at the crossroads wanted us to help. I guess I might as well talk to him tomorrow,” he said.

He didn’t have Varric’s tongue, didn’t know how to gracefully drop a topic. If someone wanted to take it up with him, he directed them to talk to his fist. This was getting too heavy.

Varric’s eyes were on him for a moment longer before he nodded his head and then rested it on a moss-covered stone to sleep.

*

Before they’d had their brief visit to Val Royeaux, right after the first trip to the Hinterlands, Edric had leaned a little toward teaming up with the Templars. He didn’t like them more, fuck no, but he had guessed that they might be the ones they wouldn’t get in hot water over. The way he saw it, the Inquisition was weak as a three-legged bronco and needed allies with money and influence, and you didn’t get that with rebels. Lords and ladies tended to like things how they’d always been – after all, it was the old way that had put them at the top of the food chain. Orzammar or Orlais, humans or dwarves, that was pretty much always true. Now that the Templars were shut off in their keep, though, they were making the nobles antsy, too, if Josephine was to be believed. This left Edric back at square one.

For now, he could still tarry. The Corporal’s people gave them some sensible stuff to do. No demons, no magic, no earth-shattering decisions – the people simply needed food and clothes and a good healer. On his way, he’d collected a quiet Grey Warden with a beard that’d make a dwarf jealous and soon added an elven archer and Qunari mercenary to the growing gang.

The Bull was good to trade stories with. He was in the same line of work as Edric used to be just a few short weeks ago, minus the spy thing, obviously. Sera was brilliant. The moment she dumped a load of pants into his arms, he knew he’d like that one. Together with Varric, who was just the right man to handle an oversized loudmouth and a ball of energy and cusses, he suddenly had a group whose presence he looked forward to. The three traded clever jabs and dirty jokes on their travels rather than grave omens and ill-spirited insults over race and class. Sera never even questioned Edric simply doing whatever fell in his lap. He could see Bull and Varric trying to figure out the patterns to Sera’s Red Jenny stuff, but here Edric was ahead of the spy and the author. She was chaos stuffed in a tiny elven body with a terrible haircut and had nothing but a hazy direction to her actions. Edric had seen it at once because it was nice not to be the only one anymore.

If Edric had hoped for variation by sending the Inquisition troops to scout a new place, the Storm Coast wasn’t it. The only difference was that it had less people and more darkspawn stragglers. The latter were a familiar sight bordering on welcome, until the first hurlock had him pinned to the ground, stinking slobber dripping onto Edric’s face between rotting teeth. Fuck darkspawn, too. This was a nightmare he knew, though.

They walked half a day along the craggy, grey coast to reach another gash in the world that a frightened scout had blathered about last evening. After a brief stop to eat, Sera was currently sitting in a knotted tree that clung precariously to the side of the cliff, naked branches stretching into the cold air.

“I feel like a pirate captain!” She shouted. The salty wind tore at her hair and swallowed her laughter.

“You’re on land!” Edric barked, cupping his mouth with his hands because the wind dispersed his deep voice into nothing but another creak of a ship wreck stranded against the rocks. “Come on, or we’ll leave you up there!” he threatened, grinning anyway.

“I can catch up to you, stumpylegs!”

“Don’t hurry her,” Varric said solemnly, yet loud enough for Sera to catch it as well. “Buttercup’s an elf, they’re very in tune with nature! She has to show her appreciation to the tree!”

Predictably, Sera looked like Varric had shoved a piece of fresh lemon into her mouth. With a war cry, she jumped and landed next to him, threatening the guffawing dwarf with her raised fist.

“You arse, you ruined it! And don’t call me Buttercup!”

“Sorry, Buttercup, but everyone gets a nickname. That’s just how I do things.”

“Not true.” Apparently resigned to continue their journey, Sera fell in line next to Bull, stabbing her slender finger at Edric. “Why doesn’t he have a nickname?”

“What, the Herald? He already got one from everyone else. It’s pretty fitting.”

“I’d like another,” Edric was quick to throw in.

“Yeah, don’t be lazy,” Sera demanded.

Shrugging, Varric caught Edric’s gaze.

“Maybe I just haven’t figured him out yet.”


	4. Chapter 4

“What do you all think about this mess?”

“Which one?” Varric asked, without looking up from the parchment laying across his lap as he filled it with another line of small, neat letters.

Edric’s beard hid his smile.

“Templars or mages?”

Sitting beside him by the crackling fire, poking the glowing ash with a stick, Sera made an annoyed noise.

“They’re all forcing the little people from their homes,” she proclaimed. “But mages are really, really dangerous. I think it’s a dumb idea to put lots more magic into a creepy magic hole. Could go _boom_ again really easily, couldn’t it?”

Shrugging his shoulders, Edric frowned. He had never thought about it like that and he didn’t know how all this magic stuff worked, not even the thing in his hand. He’d trusted his advisors that letting some mages deal with the hole in the sky was generally a good idea, but Sera made a decent point.

“I don’t know much about magic,” Bull said, “but I’d be damn careful with these mages, too. There’s a lot of political implications here. If the Inquisition supports the mages, then that’s quite the statement you’re making.”

“Good thing I know fuck all about human politics.”

“Here’s a tip: not many people like mages,” the Iron Bull said flatly. “Also, apostates are more likely to attract demons and become abominations and crap like that. We’ll have to live with them in the camp, you know.”

The qunari’s massive hand tightened around the grip of his axe, which laid next to him. Maybe he expected some shade to jump out of the surrounding bushes. Edric didn’t blame him – they liked doing that lately.

“ _People_ can do pretty awful things in general.” Resting his quill in the ink pot, Varric glanced at the Bull. “The Templars in Kirkwall proved that much, even before Meredith got the idol.”

“You wanna go with the mages?” Edric clarified.

“I’ll tell you the same thing I told Hawke back then: I don’t know. I’m a business man, this is not my field of expertise. Whatever gets less people killed, I’ll hold to that, but right now...” Varric took a sip from his flask of water and sighed. “Mages do some really stupid shit when they’re cornered. I mean, most everyone does, but not everyone has access to demons or fiery rain. The Templars aren’t the good guys here, though, despite the pretty shining armour. You wanna think carefully before you declare these people your closest allies. Some of them have done atrocious things – and they didn’t even need demons whispering in their ears.”

“Wasn’t it a mage who blew up your hometown, Varric?” Bull asked.

A rare shadow of real hostility passed over Varric’s face.

“Oh, _believe me_ , Blondie should better not show his face anywhere close to me and Bianca soon. But it was the Templars who drove the followers to his mage revolution.”

“A Templar can’t stitch himself and his dead thugs into some monster jumble of corpses – unless you were embellishing that bit,” Bull pressed on.

Though he couldn’t read Varric’s books, Edric had heard about Orsino’s final form. Many of his Carta colleagues, like him, mostly worked the Free Marches, and a few had been present when things went to shit in Kirkwall. He’d always counted that story as nonsense, but his perspective on what could actually exist outside of tales had shifted since this whole Herald thing started.

“No, I wasn’t. Frankly, I don’t want to be able to make shit like that up. But a Templar managed to turn the statues of Kirkwall against us. It’s not like that was more fun to deal with.”

“Great. Everyone’s terrible,” Sera summarised.

“That’s not news,” Edric grunted.

Back to square one. What to do? Brooding over the question, he took two of the sticks bending over the fire to check on the pieces of bread with cheese they’d pierced on them. One was already burnt brown, the other still soft. It gave him an idea.

“Varric, left or right?”

The dwarf looked up at the bread.

“Left.”

Edric handed him the left piece of bread. Left, he’d told himself before, was mages. Essentially, this had been a coin flip for him.

That was not the most refined way to go about choosing, but it wasn’t like debating the good and the bad was getting anyone anywhere, either. Seemed like everyone living topsides hadn’t done anything else for years and look where they’d ended up. Edric simply had had to make a damn decision and stick to it.

*

When the sun blinded him as he emerged from the smoke-filled twilight of the _Gull and Lantern_ , Edric felt more than ever that he’d been right. Not that the mages had been cooperative, the opposite, really. Edric had stumbled right into a crowd of magickers frightened enough to piss their dresses, confused townsfolk and Tevinter soldiers, laying in front of him a situation as entangled as a ball of yarn after the kittens had gotten to it. Point was, though, Bull, Sera and Varric looked like they’d been hit in the face with bricks because no one had expected this shit and thus the back and forth between all Inquistion members had, indeed, been a useless debate. Things had completely turned on their head.

“I’m no lord, but Tevinter sounds dangerous to me. Aren’t they gonna get in a lot of trouble with the nobles around here?” Edric asked under his breath as they pushed past a group of whispering Chantry sisters.

“ _That’s_ putting it mildly,” Varric said.

“This could be preparations for an invasion of Ferelden,” Iron Bull said, “and you better believe the banns around here know it, too, if the Tevinters kicked the lord out of his own castle.”

“I understand the desperation,” Varric said with reluctance, “but this will get kids and moderates and tranquils all in trouble. Shit, this is almost as bad an idea as Blondie’s... it could be just as deadly.”

“Yeah, for everyone who’s not even got a hand in making that deal,” Sera hissed. “Bloody Tevinter bastards and Fiona, too, that cow!”

Edric stopped the party a little off the street by a wooden fence so they could talk without being overheard. Goats were grazing behind it against a backdrop of dog roses with sunlight dancing on the rain-wet leaves and petals. If you’d just arrived fresh in town and didn’t tilt your head up to look skywards and see that shade of green in the distance, you wouldn’t believe Redcliffe was in any trouble. The day would be bright and nice after the early morning rain and the fugitives in the market square look like villagers. You couldn’t really see Thedas going to shit in Redcliffe yet. But how long until it all spilled out here, too, like it had at the Conclave, and left only burnt corpses and ash?

Leaning on the hilt of his weapon, Bull frowned. “Fereldans are not gonna take well to Tevinter presence. Everyone with magic will seem like a threat. Allying with Tevinter is the mages declaring themselves not equal, but superior.”

“They don’t even get to be all high and mighty, though! They made themselves slaves to these creepy Tevinter arses. What a shit idea!”

Edric interrupted them with a growl.

“The world is fucking ending. None of us have time for this. Why now?”

“That’s what the high and mighty ones do, though, isn’t it? Demons aren’t getting in any of their Tevinter castles yet.”

“If they haven’t called them there, at least,” Bull interrupted Sera.

“They don’t care that people here are dying! They just care about gettin’ more!”

The elven girl kicked a en empty pail that crashed into a fence post with a rattle of old wood and rusty metal.

“Besides that, the Circles in the Marches are going up in flames and in Orlais the courtiers are fighting over the crown,” Varric added. “Ferelden is not going to get any help. I’ll bet anything Gereon Alexius is well aware of that.”

“Strategically, it’s damn good timing for Ferelden to be infested with demon spawn so they can’t concentrate on herding in the mages.” Peering up, Bull shook his horned head. “Makes me wonder if Alexius didn’t have a hand in putting that thing there.”

With a deep breath, Edric calmed himself.

“If we go to the Chantry, we might find out.”

He looked to the building at the other end of the village, half obscured behind trees, looking for all the world completely peaceful.

“Keep your hands on your weapons. Should surprise me if this isn’t a trap.”

*

Edric remembered thinking, as he had strode towards the Chantry, that he was getting the hang of this. True, he had had no clue how to handle a Tevinter magister, but the situation had pulled the rug out under all of them – and Edric had gotten passably good at pretending to know what he was doing. Even as he had talked to the two young Tevinter mages and later reported back to the Inquisition leaders, everyone else’s astonishment and confusion suddenly had him feeling a bit in control, if only because no one else was.

Talk about missing the damned mark by a mile and a half.

All this chatter about magic that could undo the world had gone way over his head. After all, how was it different than the magic that was already doing that? Turned out what Alexius had cooked up was another shade of creepy, or so Dorian had told him as they found themselves in a rotting prison cell with no indication of how they’d gotten there. Dorian had claimed they had travelled through time.

The castle was crumbling around them, and so where the people they found. Leliana looked a corpse walking. He didn’t know what they had done to her and he didn’t want to. While he cared little about the enigmatic human, she underlined quite colourfully that the dark, demon-infested castle they were passing through in search of Alexius was a good representation of Thedas after a year of his master’s rule. They got reports of Fade armies swarming the lands, an _Elder One_ pulling Alexius’ strings, saw magickers exploding into abominations before their very eyes and red lyrium growing out of every cracked stone and broken floor. Edric couldn’t imagine how it had come to this, and he understood much less how anyone could stop devastation on this scale if the Inquisition in this time hadn’t managed on their own.

Something screamed, high above, too close, and the ground shuddered. Edric pulled his sword out of another dead Fade monster’s chest.

“We have all the shards now,” Varric said, his voice hollow with an echo that wasn’t just the sound being thrown back by the passageway.

“Time to kick Alexius’ arse.”

Sera grinned, showing teeth and little joy.

Edric forced himself to look at his two companions. He owed them a glance at their faces, even though for him it had just been an hour or two since they’d been perfectly fine, not these nightmarish shadows of themselves. But whatever he and Dorian had messed up in their talk with Alexius had started a road that ended with Varric and Sera here. All of this, he thought, fighting down a wave of nausea, was the result of his decision and thus his responsibility.

Varric was haggard and the weight of Bianca, which was the size of a dwarf and no light contraption, was visibly pulling him down at every step. Occasionally he made a joke to no one that even he himself hardly bothered to smile at. Sera swore at the enemies with more venom than laughter now. She was so thin that her head seemed too big for her body and her gaze was nervously darting here and there without pause. Had she ever been old enough to run with them? Ancestors, she was probably just a little more than half Edric’s age. He’d fought when he was that young, sure, he’d fought when he was way younger, but not like this. Not these kinds of enemies. He didn’t know what half this Fade shit even _was_.

It was clear as day, too, that Varric and Sera were tainted. It wasn’t the greyish, dull poison of the Blight that the two carried. Edric had seen enough people blighted in his days. Instead, the two were surrounded by a reddish mist that clouded their eyes and seemed to come from their very flesh. They looked like they had dragon fire in their blood. He didn’t ask if it hurt. He was sure he knew the answer.

Through a long corridor, they approached the door of Alexius’ throne room.

“We can set this right,” Dorian promised.

“But all of this is real, _they_ are real.” Edric cursed under his breath. He wished he was better with words; he didn’t even have the phrases to describe what about all of this he didn’t understand. “It’s just gonna... vanish?”

“As far as we understand, it will be erased from existence like a dream. Only the two of us will remember.”

“I’m sure I speak for everyone when I say I could live without remembering the last year,” Varric said quietly. “Whatever you’ve got, don’t hold back.”

“I’m sorry,” Edric blurted out.

Varric glanced at him.

“For what?”

“All of this,” he said, drawing the words out. “If the mark had still been... in the world, maybe...”

Shit, he didn’t know how he would have solved it, even with the anchor. But all they were doing right now led up to the conclusion that with him, things would go differently, didn’t it? Why else should they bother bringing Edric back? He tore at the buckle of his right gauntlet, which kept on slipping from his sword hand. Green sparks flew, as if the anchor responded to the touch.

“I’ve been meaning to tell you ‘sorry’, anyway, about some crap I said. Doesn’t matter now.” Edric smiled tightly. “If Alexius kills us, at least I can say I did it.”

“That’s not good enough. I expect you to live through this and apologise when you get back. Though,” Varric touched his own forehead, “red lyrium isn’t making my memory better. I wouldn’t know what for.”

In a desperate attempt to ward off, Edric cracked another smile. “But you in the past won’t even know you’ve been telling me to apologize in the future. I think.”

Varric chuckled like a rusty hinge and coughed. His red eyes turned back to Edric.

“Can you swear on that?”

The gates to the throne room loomed in front of them.

“Fuck no, like I know how this works.”

“So do it just in case. I probably got things to answer for, too. It usually goes two ways.”

“Are you ready?” Leliana interrupted them, commanding rather than asking.

Turning from Varric, Edric strode towards the door, his knees weak but his steps steady.

“Does it matter?”

He didn’t make that a question, either.

*

Standing over Alexius’ dead body, the very walls of the castle shaking with the Elder One’s howls, was not much of a relief. The last moment of triumph died as Edric saw a silent nod pass between Varric and Sera. It was all they needed to agree on their strategy; and though Edric opened his mouth to protest, Leliana cut him short.

“Look at us. We’re already dead.”

The young elf and Varric stepped out together, only looking back to close the heavy wings of the door behind them.

The battle noises outside dragged on for that whole hour Dorian needed to complete the spell and Edric stared transfixed at the closed door. This wasn’t right. The fighting was the only thing anyone in the Inquisition had ever asked of him that he was good at. Archers like Sera and Varric could duck behind him as they fumbled for flasks or coated their arrows with poison. Getting torn to shreds on the frontline, that was what you had people with shields and swords for, people like Edric.

No, Edric didn’t want to be out there. He didn’t want to die. But the longer he stood uselessly next to Dorian, the more it drove him mad. He just _waited_ , listening how two brave warriors he’d fought next to for weeks were worn down. Anything would have been better, perhaps even fighting that losing battle alongside them. He hadn’t heard Sera shout in a while, and now the telltale crash and clink of Varric’s crossbow releasing was gone, too.

As the door began to shake, Leliana’s Andrastian prayers joined the noise outside. There was humming of air and reality bending under Dorian’s hands.

When the doors flew open, he saw Sera on the ground, back bent at an odd angle. Varric’s body, dragged along by a demon, hit the stone like a sack of earth. His straw hair was drenched in blood and he was missing an arm. Leliana dropped her bow and charged towards the demons with a knife just as the air behind Edric ripped apart and Dorian grabbed his arm.

Edric had to believe Dorian. He had to. The only way to help anyone was to leave them to die. _That damn magicker better be right._

Half a second later and they were back in Redcliffe Castle’s great hall in their own time. Alexius stared, grew pale and fell to his knees. To his sides, Dorian and Felix looked on expectantly for Edric to say something.

He settled for kicking Alexius in the face and watching him tumble down the stairs to the throne.


	5. Chapter 5

While Cassandra, Leliana, Cullen and Dorian oversaw the mages stumbling into their camp until late in the night, Edric worked on getting drunk enough to forget what he had seen. The tavern was a good place to hide from the general bustle. Only a few tired soldiers, Flissa and Sera were with him. Sera didn’t want to watch the mages arriving, she’d told him very clearly, and she thought letting them go free was a shit idea, just so he knew. Draped over a wobbling chair, she was stuffing her face with white bread and here and then throwing angry glances his way. Her eyes were a muted wheat-brown colour. He’d never noticed before, but he’d remember now. He’d remember so that they wouldn’t keep turning red in his head.

“Why’re you starin’ at me like that?” Sera snapped, eventually. 

“No reason.”

He placed the mug of ale down. Since he’d been a kid, he’d drowned terror and pain in drink, but he needed his wits about him. There was something he had to do.

The village was crawling with people. Usually a sleepy quiet sank over the camp when the dark did and everyone fled into their tents and huts from the cold. A few lookouts on rickety wooden platforms glancing over the palisade were then the only ones left outside, snow softly sinking down on them. Edric had often seen them looking from his half-opened door when he couldn’t sleep and tried to calm his mind, or at least freeze himself so the bed would seem welcoming. Tonight, the sounds of shouting, hasty footsteps squelching in the mud, clanking armour and whinnying pack animals were worse than in a market place.

Edric found Varric inside the crowded Chantry, chatting to a couple of grey-haired crones in faded mage robes. Though he didn’t speak louder than any of the others, Edric saw those standing close turn their heads. People did that, he’d noticed. Audiences just _happened_ when Varric talked.

He was tempted to just stand there and listen, too. His limbs were heavy, his muscles sore, his head ached and he wanted to let himself be drawn into the irresistible pull of Varric’s tale. However, as soon as the first recognised him, people stepped back, speaking over Varric in hushed whispers. One man folded his hands in prayer and _bowed_ to Edric. Within seconds, he had sucked up everyone’s attention and expectant gazes. Varric, too, was looking at him.

“You got a minute?” Edric asked, pretending like everyone wasn’t staring at him.

“At your service.”

Since the Chantry was full to bursting with Inquisition agents and mages who needed to be cantoned, Edric directed them outside, dodging masses of elbows and hips. The winter wind greeted them blowing through the massive open doors. The air was so cold it was painful to the lungs. Varric pulled the scuffed lapels of his leather duster tighter around himself.

“Maker’s balls,” he muttered, starring up at the sky. “They couldn’t have had their Conclave someplace a little warmer?”

“Could be worse,” Edric said. He was cold, too, but he always figured as long as nothing turned blue and stiff, there was no reason to complain.

“Sure,” Varric stretched the word, “in the centre of an ice spell. You lived in the Marches as well. Don’t you miss the sun?”

“You get even less of it under a hundred feet of solid stone.”

Varric huffed. “Thanks for reminding me Thedas has an abundance of places I don’t want to be at.”

They both looked up at the sky for another moment. It didn’t get dark at night so close to the Breach.

“Don’t tell me you don’t miss the stone these days. You know, having something between you and the sky.”

“Can’t say I’ve ever had that pleasure for more than a few weeks and it’s never worked out particularly well for me.”

Edric inclined his head. “Right. Guessed you were a born surfacer.”

“How so? Have I not sufficiently insisted on my dwarven honour?” Varric’s voice dripped sarcasm.

“Nah, it’s just, no dwarf born under stone gets turned around in caves like you do.”

That explanation made Varric smile for some reason, but he didn’t answer. With a wave of his hand, Edric led him away from the people along the main roads. He’d been living in the hut where he had woken up after their first attempt to close the Breach. As he opened the door, he found the house pleasantly not beset with mages. He didn’t like most of the Herald stuff, but after a lifetime of sleeping tightly packed with his ever-switching comrades in stinking taverns and stables on their way from this mission to that contract, having a room of his own wasn’t half bad.

Varric moved towards the fire like a moth.

“What can I help you with?”

Now that Varric was standing here, whole, healthy, and blissfully unaware of the year of dread and torture he’d lived through (however that worked), Edric wasn’t sure how to start. It didn’t come as easy as the first time. He hadn’t fucked up that bad – yet. All hemming and hawing wasn’t gonna make it go faster, though. He folded his arms in front of his chest and stared at his own boots.

“I wanted to say sorry. Some time ago, I took some shit out on you that wasn’t your fault.”

“You mean back in the Hinterlands?”

Edric looked up. With a glove-covered hand, Varric brushed snow from his own crooked nose.

“Don’t worry, I didn’t hold a grudge about that. I get it, this whole Herald business is tough on you. It would be on anyone. But – thank you.”

“Really? ‘Cause when we started out, you used to drop by the tavern to talk every once in a while. You stopped that. Hardly ever speak to me when we’re out if I don’t ask you something.”

Pride forbid him from showing his disappointment, but Varric was daft if he thought Edric would swallow nothing had changed from that moment in the Hinterlands on.

With an uneasy smile, Varric pushed a log of wood deeper into the fireplace.

“Actually... I didn’t think you liked me very much. This is kind of a surprise.”

That figured. Edric knew well he wasn’t good at showing he wanted to be friends. There weren’t too many people that applied to, anyway. Smuggling wasn’t the business for hugs and giggles.

“You’re alright,” he said. “I just don’t play nice too well.”

A smile hid under his beard as Varric laughed.

“As long as it’s not personal, then.”

“It’s not.”

Varric waited for Edric to sit down on the bed before he pulled up the chair from the desk and turned it around to him.

“You know, I have a friend, an elf – he makes brooding into an art. You’d think he doesn’t rate anyone in the world higher than the pebbles under his naked feet, the way he scowls everywhere he goes. But get him drunk during a bar fight, and suddenly he’ll threaten everyone who comes too close to someone he likes with a broadsword.”

Edric nodded his head. More words for ‘I understand’ than needed, but that was Varric. He felt a little relieved that he didn’t have to play docile to keep him around.

“Sounds like a guy I’d like.”

“Maybe I can introduce you some time.” Leaning back, Varric narrowed his eyes on him. “What made you apologise now?”

After deliberating for a second, Edric shrugged. Might as well go with the truth. “You told me to.”

“Beg pardon?”

“I met you, when... well, Dorian explained where we went, right?”

“To a very bleak future,” Varric said, the heel of his boot scuffing rhythmically against the ground. “Red lyrium and demons everywhere? A mad Tevinter mage’s paradise?”

“Something like that.”

The thought of it almost closed his throat again. It _had_ been real to him and the worst was, it wasn’t over with yet, even with Alexius in chains. There was still a possibility all that could happen. His Elder One still had to be out there, and so were the rest of his conspirators. What did Edric have to do to stop it? He could see nothing of the way he had to go but the terrible end.

“I still can’t believe you travelled through time,” Varric said after a long moment of silence.

Edric grunted. “Tell me about it.” He tore at the buckle of his right gauntlet, just as he’d done the last time they talked, a year in the future. “I met you there. You, Sera and Leliana.”

With a surprised noise, Varric sat up straighter in the chair.

“Alexius had you in his prison cells. Leliana had the Blight, but you two...” He recalled the weakened shades of his comrades. “I don’t know what the fuck they did to _you_. It looked like the red lyrium got _in_ you, like it gets into stone. Maybe they made you drink it.” He waved a hand before his face. “You had red eyes and red mist around you.”

“Well, shit.” Judging by his expression, Varric had a good enough imagination to supply what he hadn’t seen himself. “But we were we still on your side?”

“Yeah, you didn’t turn crazy the way you described your brother did. I apologised to you, and you told me to better patch things up here...” Edric breathed deeply. Frankly, there was enough shit in this part of reality that could depress Varric just fine, but he needed to get this rock off his chest. Not admitting he’d left them to die felt like hiding, even though it didn’t mean shit to Varric’s health in the presence. “We beat Alexius, but Dorian needed more time for that spell he did to get us back. I had to return with him, so the three of you agreed to keep the demons off our backs.” He lowered his head. “I stood like a damn ancestor’s statue... for an hour, listening to them taking you guys apart. Watched a demon drag in your corpse just before Dorian pulled me through that hole.”

Varric opened his mouth and closed it wordlessly. Edric stared ahead, seeing again the army of monstrosities banging down the door.

“So that means I’m only alive because of you.”

“Because of Dorian.”

In truth, Edric had done very little than run after him. That seemed to be a theme in his life lately.

“I’m sure you had a hand in slapping down that mad dog Alexius as well. I’ve seen you fight.”

It was a pretty sentiment which lifted his spirits a little. At the same time, Edric resented his reaction. Did he really need someone to hold his hand like he was a whining kid? Yeah, he’d pitied himself plenty, but in silence. That gentle voice Varric was using on him was a bit much to take. Edric gave himself a mental slap over the head.

“There’s something else I’ve wanted to ask you,” he said, abruptly.

“I’m listening.”

“Is your offer still on the table? You gonna teach me how to read?”

Now Varric’s smile really opened up. It was sunny, that was the way Edric would describe it. Not really a word that fit a dwarf, but damn, it made him think of a bright day somewhere lots nicer than here.

“With pleasure. I mean, how will you _ever_ enjoy _Hard in Hightown_ properly if you can’t read and re-read it at your leisure?”

Edric grinned.

“Yeah, right.”

“Although... do you mind me asking why no one’s ever taught you? I mean, I suspect you’re more of a, er, hands-on worker in your family, but still – the Cadashs usually take care of their own.” With a snort, Varric shook his head. “You wouldn’t be half as much trouble if you didn’t teach your people how to read and fake ledgers.”

Edric halted again. He’d told him so much now, he might as well add a bit. Talking to Varric was so easy it was tempting. Did the Tethras spymaster get everyone’s dirty laundry this way?

“You speak lots. Can you keep a secret?”

“Until I go to the stone or whatever else happens to us cloudgazer dwarves, if need be. Is it that bad?”

“I’m not ashamed. Just don’t want everyone talkin’ to me about it. It’s none of their business.” He pulled a knot out of his beard. “‘sides, I think Josie would have a heart attack.”

“We don’t want that,” Varric said by way of agreement.

“I’m Cadash in name, but that’s about it. My dad was, got my mom pregnant the one night they were together. She was a whore from Dust Town. She died before I really knew her. I spent my childhood scouring the collapsed tunnels for lyrium for the miner casts before I grew too big to fit through most cracks.” Some of his oldest and worst scars were reminders of those times. “I had a broad back and a big mouth, so obviously I got involved with the Carta. A couple Cadash cousins of mine had kept an eye on me as I grew up, gave me some food here and there. They picked me up as a hired sword. Shit, I wasn’t even one of the actual spies at the Conclave. I was just supposed to make sure our people got out in one piece.”

“So when did you come topside?”

“‘bout ten years ago now. For a job. They told me ‘go’, I went.”

“That was it? Most dwarves I know make quite the lament about it.”

“I never got that,” Edric admitted. “Kalnas, maybe, they had it good down there. And I miss the walls, the ceiling, watching the lava. Some of the people.” Few. “But Dust Town? You can’t grow old in that shithole. Every time I go back there, I’m happy to see the sky afterwards.”

Edric knew why he rarely put that part out there. No real pleasure in calling back the images of sleeping in the dung between the nugs, dodging the guards come from upper Orzammar who kicked and prodded at him for fun, lowering his eyes like a child in front of some warrior caste asshole pressing a few coins in his hand with a dismissive smile.

“I’ve seen a bit of Dust Town. Not much, but I think you made the right choice going up,” Varric said.

“You ever visit?”

“I went to Orzammar once, when I was younger. They might have recognised my brother, but they’d never seen me. I had to draw a brand on my face before I entered,” Varric recalled. “The Tethras clan was recently exciled, so I didn’t say my name and pretended to be a simple merchant. One look at the brand and most of the dwarves there treated me like dirt. I will never understand how Bartrand missed that place or these people...” Glancing at him, his eyes searched Edric’s face. “You covered your brand?”

“I tried. Whoever carved it in my face when I was a babe did a bad job of it. Almost burned a hole in my skin.” Thoughtlessly, Edric pressed his knuckles to his cheek where black ink covered the original mark. The old scars were too faded to see now, but he could still feel them. “But there’s no gettin’ rid of it, is there? Even up here dwarves look at you differently. I just made the damn thing bigger.”

Edric grit his teeth. Here he was, _casteless_ written all over his face, and people were trying to make him into some leader of the rebellion. Twenty years ago maybe he’d have thought that was justice or something. He was close to forty summers now, though, and he knew people that tried to rise too far too fast eventually got smacked down by the ones already on top. He’d made it out of Dust Town, that had been enough for him, and he knew well the place birthed no saints for Andraste, none that lived long, anyway. If you clawed your way out to the surface alive, chances were you weren’t one of the goody-goodies.

“If a dwarf up here thinks they’re better than you because some nug-licker doodled on your face when you were a child, you didn’t wanna to talk to them anyway,” Varric said. He started soft, but his voice grew more vehement as he went on: “The ties from down there shouldn’t define us here. I know they do, but much as the kalna try to pretend it’s different, the only thing that separates us is that our families brought connections and education topside. We surfacers are _all_ severed from the stone.” He grinned. “Still, as long as we don’t have to descend into that hole, even that doesn’t mean squat for our lives if we don’t let it. And there’s little that pisses the Orzammar Assembly off more than knowing they’re not relevant.”

This was new. Edric had railed against the Diamond Quarter from way back when he was a kid, and most ascended dusters spat on Orzammar, but Varric Tethras was born of more gentle folk. These high-class collectives revered Orzammar like a dumb child ran after a hateful mother, spouting about honour and ancestors the Shaperate denied them.

“Can’t imagine you made many friends among your own talking that way.”

A winning smile spread over Varric’s face. “I’m charming and very good-looking. People forgive me.”

Edric laughed. The sound surprised himself. Thinking about Dust Town usually left him ready to punch someone, but Varric had turned it around in a few short minutes.

“I can see that working for you,” Edric said, raising a brow at him.

Varric mirrored his expression. “I guess I’m not the only charmer around here.”

“Well, I got the undivided attention of the cutest dwarf of the camp for however long it takes to hammer some letters into my head. Can’t blame me for trying.”

Guessing by the slight double take, it only just now seemed to occur to Varric Edric could be serious. However, Varric hit the ball out of his court quick enough.

“Don’t let Harding hear that. It’s not fair – she can’t have chest hair like mine.” He got up, turning to the desk and the scattered papers on top of it. “Now, what’s the first book you’d like to take a look at?”


	6. Chapter 6

While the heads of the Inquisition beat the mages into shape for their big task, Edric led Varric, Solas and Blackwall to the Fallow Mire to rescue a troop of Inquisition agents. It was as bleak as any place he’d ever been and Edric was thrice happy he’d made up with Varric before choosing the company. Solas was constantly listening for old ghosts, troubled with the ripples of the Veil that Edric knew it wasn’t his nature to understand, despite that thing magic had wedged into his palm. Blackwall was his usual cheery self. It needed someone to balance all the gloom and stern faces with an occasional spirited curse at a root sticking out at just the right place to trip, or a funny story. After a few days, though, the wet air that seemed to creep under the armour plating and cloth and go right under the skin got even to Varric.

“Why can’t Ferelden demons choose nice places to live? Kirkwall was full of Fade dwellers,” he had complained as Edric carefully picked his way over a half-sunken wooden walkway held up by some posts and good faith.

“This is a place of great sorrow and loss. Some spirits are drawn to that,” Solas answered.

“Kirkwall was good at tragedy, too, and at least there I didn’t have to wade through miles of swamp.” Frowning, Varric had looked over to a house with its rotting, broken beams sticking out of the mud half-obscured by fog. “I would say at least there’s fewer people for them to kill here, but I have a feeling we’re seeing the old inhabitants crawling out of the water.”

In all their time there, Edric never made rest away from the couple of Inquisition camps they’d established, even if it meant backtracking for an hour or two. Call him a coward, but he wasn’t going to risk being dragged into the swamp by dead people because his hand landed in a puddle when he turned in his sleep, disturbing waters filled to the surface with the undead. All these moving bones and corpses really would have given him a fright enough to piss his breeches if he hadn’t already gotten over the panic part when he’d travelled through time to a world ruled by an Old God. 

The environments left him proper miserable during the days, though. Little enough sun was piercing through the cold haze and all they ever seemed to meet were wraiths moaning without words for their former lives as well as featureless skeletons mindlessly swinging their blades. He had something to look forward to in the evenings, though.

Varric started him out by writing down a list of names: first Edric’s own, then those of his comrades, of the Inquisition people he knew, and of the more important Carta families that they had both run into in the Marches. It was an easy way to remember the sounds connected to each symbol – or as easy as it got. Edric still messed up enough and usually he ended the lessons when he’d gotten pissed off because scribbles on paper could make him feel like the greatest moron on Thedas and he couldn’t punch them for it. However, he kept his head together enough to not cuss out Varric again for trying to help.

Writing was even worse. Next to Varric’s flowing, narrow, precise letters, his own attempts looked like a brat’s doodles. He was way less inclined to complain about that, though, because Varric took his calloused hands between his own to arrange his fingers when he picked up the quill wrong, and did so whenever Edric’s grip slipped. That happened quite a bit. Even Edric didn’t _really_ need to be shown how to hold the quill fifteen times, but as long as Varric showed no signs of losing patience, he wasn’t passing up the opportunity.

“I think we can start you out on your first book,” Varric said, after they had rehearsed the names and letters for easily a fortnight. “You wanted to read the _Tale of the Champion_ , right?”

“You brought that?”

“I never go anywhere without a few books.”

“Seems like packing space better used for a few more bolts.”

With a snort, Varric put his hand on Bianca. “As if we’re messy enough that I could run out. Just you wait, you only say that because you don’t know how great reading is yet.”

While he spoke, Varric moved to pull a thick copy of the book from his backpack and dropped it on Edric’s lap.

Edric opened the book. There was a stylised drawing of two birds putting their claws together on the first page, and on the opposite side a wheel of six rough portraits.

“Whose sigil is that? I’ve seen it before.”

“Hawke’s ancestors were of the Amell family. I guess you would have found it around Kirkwall quite a bit when Hawke still lived there.”

His gaze strayed to the other page. One of the six circles showed a figure with a well-known golden chain around his neck. “That’s you!”

Varric chuckled. “My publisher added that. Pretty, right?” He moved his finger along the wheel. “This little Dalish lady is Merril – Daisy – and Anders,” his hand went fast past him, “guess you know all you need to about him. Aveline, now guard captain and probably the only reason Kirkwall’s still standing today. That one’s Fenris, the broody elf I’ve told you about, and the Rivaini is Isabella, the pirate.”

Lifting his eyes from the page, Edric looked at Varric instead. He seemed happy enough most the time, but just as usual when he talked of his old friends, his words came without hesitation and his eyes looked into nothing, like he was already recalling some pleasant memory. Even mentioning Anders couldn’t hold him long from a smile that was unusually unguarded.

Maybe Varric had noticed the change too. He quickly turned to the next page, the first with text.

“You always knew how to look at pictures, Herald. Let’s get to it.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Salroka...” And Varric added a line of words that Edric felt like he _should_ recognise. There were bits and pieces there he thought he understood, but the rest was a jumble.

“Maker’s balls, what was that?”

Laughing, Varric tapped his finger on the page. “An old Orzammar dialect they forced me to learn back in the day. Mean’s ‘I shall go with something you feel more familiar with’. But I’ll teach you _that_ when you can read on your own.”

Giving him a bump in the side with his elbow, Edric finally looked at the first page that had nothing but letters on it.

“With a... ho-wel – hovel?”

“Howl.”

“With a howl the monster hit the sec... corched ground...”

Every word stretched like resin in his mouth as he parsed it letter for letter. By the time the sun had drowned in the mire, he had reached only the end of the first page, but he wasn’t so ready to throw it all down as he was after an hour of trying to write, or remembering the names Varric had spelled out for him alongside the letters. Though he was the one reading out loud, whenever he had struggled through a sentence and Varric made him repeat in its entirety, he got a flicker of Varric’s voice from the text. It wasn’t completely the same, but he recognised a few turns of phrases.

Besides, the story was getting good. Garret Hawke’s family fled Lothering with little but the clothes on their backs and a mabari by their side. If his eyes hadn’t been falling shut already, he’d have fought on. As it was, he handed the tome to Varric.

“Can you read for a while?”

Varric raised a brow.

“I already know how to do it.”

“Yeah, but I’m gonna pass out soon and its getting good.” A sudden though came to him and he added: “Shows you’re a good writer if I wanna know more, right?”

Varric chuckled. Whether the took pity on him or the flattery worked, he spread the book out over his crossed legs.

“Just a few pages,” he said.

The few pages took them to the meeting with Aveline Vallen and her husband, the death of Hawke’s brother, and ended with a dragon chasing away the remaining darkspawn. Varric closed the book with a thud.

“We call that a cliffhanger,” he said, as Edric protested.

Rolling his eyes, Edric laid back on the rough hemp blanket. He didn’t bother taking off more than the most bulky parts of his armour. The camp was strategically located behind stone walls on all sides and a couple of guards were posted, but ghosts or skeletons slithering out of the swamp might not leave them time to strap on much.

“You made that dragon thing up,” Edric said.

Eyes dramatically wide, Varric turned on his own bedstead to look at him. “Are you calling me a _liar_? Why, I’d never. Granted, I wasn’t there for that part, but... well, let’s just say it’s not the last time we meet that dragon.” He drew in air. “In a manner of speaking.”

“You weren’t fucking around then when you said you’d fought dragons?”

“Not that one, but yes, as I said... I’ve been around. Hawke insisted on bringing me along to fight dragons and demons and Orlesian nobles and that one time, an undead – or, shit, something like that – Tevinter magister. Why _were_ we ever friends, anyway?”

The fond smile prevented Varric from even pretending he meant it, but Edric thought it wasn’t the worst question. Friendship was good and all, but shit, he wanted to live.

“If that’s the way to your heart, you must be in love with me by now,” he muttered.

Varric laughed.

“Find me a High Dragon and I’ll be yours.”

*

By the time they were back at Haven, Hawke had arrived in Kirkwall and collected his mismatched group of criminals, idealists and runaways, and Edric’s reading was a little bit less torturous to listen to. In a few week’s time he could probably do it by himself, silently, and he looked forward to mastering something he’d long told himself not to hope for anymore. Still, Varric had the storyteller’s skill and handing the book on to him to read out loud when Edric was done practcising would be missed.

Together with him, he sat on a low fence just outside the wooden stockades of Haven one early evening, watching Dennet bring in his horses during a soft snowfall. There’d been some moaning about his priorities from Sera and Dorian when he insisted on trekking through the Hinterlands again for nothing but a few better horses, but she was a child and city brat and he was a sheltered Tevinter bureaucrat. Edric, though, had spent big chunks of his life on horseback, in combat and travelling. Good horses could make or break an endeavour like this one.

“We’ll have enough horses now that they won’t need them all here. Each of us can have one for travel.”

“I guess it’ll be faster.”

Varric’s apprehensive tone was accompanied by a long gaze at a horse trying its best to get in position to kick one of the stable boys in the head.

“They’re a bit _tall_ , aren’t they? Don’t we dwarves usually have fat, woolly ponies?”

“Ponies are for kids and people who have nowhere to be,” Edric said dismissively.

“Kalna don’t usually like horses much. Plus, there’s not a lot of space for them in Kirkwall.”

“You don’t know how to ride?”

It didn’t really surprise Edric. Human nobles learned to ride before they could walk, but kalna continued the traditions of their ancestors, and those didn’t include horses. Besides, they usually had the coin and time to hire carriages.

“I know how to cling on to the saddlebow, if that helps?” Varric asked with a lopsided smile. “I’ve trotted some places on ponies, but I’ve never raced a horse over a frozen mountainside.”

With a grunt, Edric pushed himself off the fence, his boots hitting the snow dirtied by a hundred feet with a splat, and gestured at Varric.

“Come. You’re gonna have to be steady in that saddle.”

“Is this revenge for when I made you spell all the Tevinter city names?”

Edric only smirked.

“You want a sturdy horse. We’ll be travelling, not racing, and dwarves aren’t lightweight. Some overbred Orlesian court palfrey won’t carry you over rough ground for a day. If its bred to carry an armoured knight or looks like it could pull a plough, it’s good.”

Under Edric’s lead, they threaded between the animals and people towards the enclosure were most of the new horses stood. Dennet’s horses were Fereldan Forders, hardy animals who could live off dry grass or moss in the mire if they had to. They’d been priced in the Marches among smugglers like him because you could go off the beaten path with these animals and they wouldn’t balk at caves, woods or swampland.

“Any of these will do,” Edric said expectantly, nodding his head at the horses so Varric would know to choose one.

“Maybe I can find the horse with the softest hooves, since I’m about to be thrown off and trampled...”

A chestnut-coloured stallion with a white dot on its forehead was the one Varric decided on.

“The white fur looks like the Chantry sun,” he claimed. “Really, it should be your steed.”

“Uh-huh.”

To Edric, it was just a slightly spread-out blaze, but that was probably why he wasn’t the one scribbling all the time. He left Varric to get to know the animal, which gently tried to nip his straw-coloured hair, while Edric went to fetch the harness.

“What about a saddle?” Varric asked, as Edric guided the horse’s square, broad head down by the mane and began looping the leather straps around it.

“Bareback’s better if it’s two people.”

“Is it two people?”

“‘Course. We’re galloping through snow and you’re a spoilt, squishy kalna, I don’t want you to break your neck. Gotta show you how to do it first.”

Grinning, Edric patted Varric’s back and pulled the horse in position in front of the fence they’d sat on. Climbing up was the most awkward part of riding, he contemplated, as he pulled his muscular bulk on top of the horse’s back. Could’ve used those long human legs at that point.

“Spoilt?” Varric asked from the height of his ankles. “I wish! A couple of nights ago, we slept on briars and rocks.”

And Varric used to live a tavern. Edric had learned that reading the _Tale of the Champion_. ‘Funnier company than Hightown, and the drink was alright’, he’d said, when Edric had asked why. Edric predicted the non-answers on stuff like Varric’s family and past by now, and he didn’t take it amiss. Talking about those things wasn’t his own favourite hobby, either. Still, it did make him ever more curious.

Varric mounted the horse with much more grace and speed than Edric. Rogue’s advantages – all that dodging and running and flipping across the battlefield paid off. Edric gave his level best to keep his thoughts mostly on horses as the limber dwarf sat down in front of him. Sure this was nice, but teaching Varric to stay on horseback in the wild was a genuine concern if he wanted to cut travel time. While all that magic crap went way over his head, he’d started to contribute whatever common sense told him to the Inquisition.

“You take the reins. Lead us away from camp.”

As they passed Cullen’s training grounds, soldiers craned their necks and stilled their notched practice swords to watch the two dwarves ride past. Most humans thought it was a funny sight, as he knew from travelling with various mercenary groups (Edric had loved it when they’d laughed about it to him when he was in the saddle because he didn’t get to kick humans between the shoulder blades with reinforced leather boots too often, given how tall they were). But that wasn’t all now, of course, him being the Herald. He put his hands on Varric’s hips even at the slow trot, hiding the unnatural scar away against his side and focused on the dark trees in front of them.

“Trot,” Edric commanded, and Varric tensed as he dug his boots into the horse’s sides. They were moving along the bank of the lake before Haven.

Edric patted Varric’s side.

“Relax. Our legs are too short to stand up in stirrups. You’ve got to learn how to move with the horses so you don’t bounce on its back so hard.”

“I didn’t know you were such an experienced rider.”

Varric’s pose slackened just a little. He reached to fold his collar up.

“You know what I really like about Ferelden nature, among other things? The constant wind.”

“You could grow a beard. It’d be a bit less cold.”

“It looks better on you,” Varric said, smiling over his shoulder.

Edric tightened his grip as a response. There were still like three layers of cloth between them. Not too inappropriate, all things considered.

“Let’s go faster. Stay relaxed, just hold on with your legs. I know it’s pretty much the opposite of what you wanna do, but it’s easier that way. I’ll keep you up if you slip.”

“I have no doubt you will keep holding on,” Varric said, before he snapped the reins.

The Ferelden Courser wasn’t the fastest horse Edric had ever ridden, but once he had his speed he didn’t slow down anymore. Snow and bits of earth flew as high as their knees as it tore forward. The icy wind and snowflakes slapped in his face, beard be damned. Before him, Varric made a sort of aborted noise and clung to the mane, rigid as a board, tilting dangerously right as he locked up. Edric slid his arms around his waist. 

“You’re not gonna fall!” he shouted like an order.

Eventually Varric noticed he wasn’t on the ground with his skull bashed open yet and yielded a little more. He followed Edric’s lead in moving his hips along with the rhythm of the horse’s movements. His seat was more secure now, giving Edric too much time to think about sitting so close, with his hands crossed over Varric’s stomach.

When Varric pulled the reins, they had ridden a good way away from Haven, to the other side of the lake and up the hill. In the freshly fallen snow, their horse’s trail was the only mark. As Varric breathed deeply in and out, Edric could feel his ribcage rising and falling. Varric’s cheeks and nose were red from the cold and it made his brown eyes seem even warmer. Edric, with his chin almost leaning on Varric’s shoulder, suddenly wished to be thinking about his chest pressed to Varric’s back again. That was a whole blighted lot easier to grasp than the sudden twinge of nerves at Varric’s smile.

“You are not a bad teacher.”

“It’s fun not being the dumb bastard for once,” Edric said as he straightened.

“Bastard, I’ll grant you. But you’re really not as stupid as I am afraid of sitting on giant animals with bad tempers.”

Edric smiled into his beard. The horse had come to a stand and Varric let the reins go so it could lean down and nibble at some yellow grass sticking out of the thick white blanket. Snow was still falling. Haven laid in a valley under them and looked pretty damn small compared to the mountains all around. That green hole in the sky could have swallowed it whole. Had it always been that enormous? Was it growing? Or did he usually just try not to pay it too much attention?

“With any luck, it’ll be gone by next week,” Varric said. He was looking up, too.

“And I’ll be on clean-up duty with the Fade rifts, and this whole thing will be over with.”

Like the strange dream it had been from the start.

“Call me a pessimist, but I’ve got a feeling it’s not gonna be all that easy.”

With a firm but gentle grip, Varric lifted one of Edric’s hands from his stomach, turning it so that the faint green light illuminated his face.

“We still don’t know who put the thing up there... or down here.”

“Someone will figure it out,” Edric said. “But I doubt they’ll need me for it.”


	7. Chapter 7

There was snow for miles and trees like Shades in the distances. Edric put one foot before the other. The cold had gotten into his blood. His limbs were stone. If his cheeks hadn’t been frozen, he might’ve smiled. He’d survived an army, an abomination and its pet dragon, and now the cold would kill him. It was almost satisfying for someone who tried hard to keep a grip on reality. For all the power that blighted creature obviously had, it still didn’t have shit on winter.

Whispers of the Elder One in the ruined future returned to him. _Corypheus_. He was too cold to care he’d die now. That was probably why people always said freezing was a good way to go. You’d hope first, and by the time you realised you didn’t anymore, you’d long stopped feeling anything. Still, he wanted to tell someone, leave a message so he wouldn’t keel over for nothing. Someone had to know that the things that had wiped Haven off the map was called Corypheus. Edric was at peace with death right now, but he didn’t want to die in vain.

That was hoping there was anyone left, of course. Sometime back, he didn’t know how long, he’d seen a couple of broken wagons. Then the storm had howled like a dragon – maybe the dragon _was_ in there – and Edric didn’t see anything anymore. Maybe his companions were all buried deep under the snow.

When the snowfall abided, he saw dark rocks jutting out of the white blanket to his left and right. He was still walking on, without goal or sense of direction, as he’d promised himself to do until his frozen legs gave out.

His boots knocked against something hard. He paused, staring, and didn’t know at what for a moment. Something red glinted up at him between white snow and black soot. Embers. _A new fireplace?_

He stared ahead and took a few more tentative steps. Halting had been a mistake. He couldn’t get his feet to move properly again. The numbness that had frozen his skin buried deep into his flesh, through his skull, and he collapsed. The last thing he heard was a woman’s voice.

*

When he woke up, it was to the sound of his advisors fighting. Cassandra stuck out with sheer fury and volume, but Cullen was giving it his best to get a word in edgewise. Together they were mostly drowning out Josephine and Leliana. Edric couldn’t make out words, but the general back and forth was familiarly soothing.

When he moved his hand, he could use his joints again. A fire crackled beside him at the open tent flap. Someone had taken off his armour and replaced it with a long leather coat, probably made for humans, which he was snugly wrapped up in.

“Look who’s back among the living. This is becoming a pattern for you.”

Edric craned his neck. In the back of the tent, Varric sat next to Edric’s breastplate and gauntlets.

“Fuck,” he groaned.

Sagely, Varric nodded his head. Edric stared at the brown fabric above.

“Everyone get out alright?” He asked. He still couldn’t believe he had.

“We lost some soldiers in the fight, naturally, but you saved us the majority of our forces with the trebuchet,” Varric said, sliding up to Edric’s side. The lines in his face looked deeper in the light of the fire, his cheeks hollow, and there were dark circles under his warm brown eyes. Edric was briefly reminded of the Varric from a year in the future and the chill returned to his insides.

“Of course, we were pretty sure we lost you there for a while,” Varric added. His smile was strained.

“So was I.”

Edric so close to the fire that the smoke and heat almost made his eyes water. It felt fucking great.

“So. You told me once that if I found you a dragon, you’d be mine,” Edric reminded Varric.

A wry laugh wrenched itself from Varric’s throat.

“Shit, I didn’t think you’d make good on that. Should’ve known better, given your track record.”

“Pity.”

He was content to stare into the flames again, but suddenly Varric’s shadow shifted. A strand of corn-coloured hair landed on Edric’s nose and brushed down over his cheeks before their cold lips connected, very briefly. When Varric leaned back, he looked surprised.

“For the dragon?” Edric asked, licking his lips. He couldn’t believe that had worked.

“For our lives,” Varric hesitated, “and for the people of Haven. The army forced your glowy hand, but you could have run straight for that Chantry.”

Of all the things he’d done today, taking his time to save the villagers trapped in burning rubble and pressed on by monsters was probably one of the things Edric hadn’t thought too hard about. Run from the army? Yeah, if he could’ve. That dragon? The moment he saw it. But leaving a bar maid and trader and whoever else’s luck had turned to shit when the world came crashing down again? Wasn’t like it had cost him much to pick them up on his way. Still, Edric wondered if he’d have done it three months ago.

“None of these poor bastards asked for Corypheus to kick their doors down, either,” he muttered.

A jolt went through Varric.

“What?!”

Edric grunted. “What, what?”

“The name you said...”

The name – the name for which he had struggled through the mountains. Suddenly, Edric felt a little more awake as well. “Corypheus,” he agreed, propping himself up on his forearms. “That’s what he told me he was called. He was some abomination with a fucked-up face and all, but he could talk and the dragon listened to him.”

“That’s impossible! You’re sure he said he was Corypheus?”

“You know him?”

Varric knew a lot of people, but Edric hadn’t thought crazy murderous magickers were among them. Then again, shit, he’d been tight with that mage Anders, too.

“Remember when I told you Hawke dragged me along to fight an undead Tevinter magister? That was his name.”

“So you fought Corypheus before?”

“We _killed_ him.” 

Silence fell over them like snow. Edric felt sick. Could be he shouldn’t have sat up; or maybe it was just the thought that this creature was immortal.

“Guess that means you kicked his ass once,” he tried, in a token show of optimism. “No reason we couldn’t do it again.”

No reason Corypheus couldn’t stand up again.

The creases on Varric’s forehead deepened and his eyes looked at something far away. “Shit,” he muttered, eventually. “This is bad. I have to tell the advisors.”

His boots scraped on the uneven stone. Halfway on his way out of the tent, he turned again. “I’ll send Mother Giselle. She’ll take care of you.”

Since the beginning, he had basically counted on Varric as the presence for good sense and a calm in the storm. As he watched him all but bolt out of the tent, face white as the mountaintops, Edric felt like his ribcage had tightened around his pounding heart.

Mother Giselle came, but Edric was in no mood to listen to her. He gave a few token nods at her words to avoid a fight he wasn’t up for. Her talk of Andraste meant as little to him as Corypheus declaring the heavens empty. These were discussions for smarter people than him. He wasn’t going to be drawn into thinking about all that nonsense or he’d go mad as a nug on lichen ale.

Instead of paying attention, Edric stared through the open flap of the tent at Varric talking fast to the group of humans that led the Inquisition, gestures hectic and expression clouded. Since Cassandra looked like she was about to grab a tent pole and flip the whole construction at Varric’s face, Edric finally forced himself to stand.

His steps were still slow in the thick snow. He saw peoples’ heads turning, but he was almost getting used to that. However, just as he had reached the group, a gentle but insistent melody overpowered their hushed, urgent voices and eventually forced them to quiet down.

“Shadows fall and hope has fled...”

Her head bowed, Mother Giselle stepped towards him, a clement smile on her face. The slow, solemn song carried over the snow-covered mountains. It echoed hopelessly into a night cold and dark as onyx, but finally tore people from their pitiful fires to gather closer.

Leliana was the first to join in, quickly followed by another, and another, and ten more. Edric didn’t know the words to the songs; he’d never visited the Chantry. However, humans and city elves around him fell in easily.

It distracted Cassandra from strangling Varric, anyway, so that was good. He just hoped they wouldn’t cause another snowslide with their ruckus. He squinted suspiciously up at the mountains around them.

It was only when he looked back down that he realised that the ring of people was not, as he’d expected, forming around Mother Giselle. Instead, they took him as its centre, like shreds of metal collected around a magnet.

Then, they all started kneeling.

A curse word on his lips, he turned to Varric. However, even Varric stared at him liked he’d just seen a paragon jump off his stone pedestal, alive as could be.

Edric leaned in close. “If you start singing, I’ll break your nose,” he hissed.


	8. Chapter 8

“Where do you figure Chuckles heard about this place?”

The wind was bracing up on the outer wall. Edric and Varric were looking down between the weather-beaten merlons into plunging, snowy depths. He had just answered Varric’s question of how ‘in the name of Andraste’s flaming knickers’, as Varric had put it, he’d managed to find Skyhold.

“His dreams, I’d wager,” Edric said, turning his head to Varric. “Place gives me the creeps. Look at this shit, it’s freezing out yet inside it looks like summer.”

“Considering we’ll live here, sounds better than if it were the other way around, don’t you think?” Varric said with a smile.

“Doesn’t it make you worry, though? Just hope the elf don’t got none of his demon friends waiting for us here.”

“Not really,” Varric admitted. “I’m from Kirkwall. Rumour says that’s built on so many tears in the Veil that it’s a wonder demons don’t come to the Hanged Man for a pint every evening.”

“I’ve been to that dump. If they did, you wouldn’t notice.”

Varric laughed and turned away from the view onto the snowy mountains to look back into the inner courtyard, where a wild garden bloomed. Slowly, Edric tore himself from the sky that seemed especially wide above him out here, bothering the part of him that had grown up with the earth eternally over his head, and positioned himself next to Varric again.

“I can see why Chuckles would be afraid people will take it the wrong way that the Orb is elven, anyway,” Varric said.

“They’re humans. They’d have found some reason to blame the elves.”

“True enough.”

A group of dishevelled-looking men and women entered the enclosed wilderness of the overgrown garden, bent under the weight of leather bags. Supporters had been arriving in a steady stream over the last days; news of their arrival had travelled fast.

“Who’d just leave a place like this unattended, though? The magic’s creepy, but otherwise, it’s perfect. You’d need a dragon to take it in a battle.”

Of course, just his luck, Corypheus had one of those.

“It’s not much of a trade hub,” Varric said. “And it sits smack in the middle between Orlais and Ferelden. Chances are this would only stay uncontested land until one royal or the other takes it for one of their nobles.” He pointed at the crenel between two merlons. “That’d be dangerously close to making claims on land across the border and, you’re right, it _is_ a castle that could withstand a battle. Establishing a strong outpost like this would look like a pretty solid start to a war, even if wasn’t meant like that. Considering Orlais’ and Ferelden’s history, they’re understandably twitchy around each other.”

Edric grunted.

“I used to think you could to Leliana’s job, but maybe you should have Josie’s instead. You got a pretty good head for all this politics shit.”

“If that’s supposed to insult me, it’s working,” Varric said, looking scandalised.

Edric cracked a smile. “I mean it. I just don’t think about things like that. Never needed to up to now.”

“Politics is just people wearing fancy hats doing all the many good and stupid things people always do. Usually the stupid things. You get used to it. And until then, you’ve got Ruffles and the Iron Lady and me for all the socially approved deceit that you need.”

Edric nodded his head, watching Varric’s profile from the corner of his eyes. He looked blighted handsome in the bright sun of the morning, golden jewellery glittering, hair torn out of the ponytail and blown about his head. He considered grabbing him and going in for another kiss, but since the tent, Varric had kept his distance of an arm’s length, though he was still perfectly friendly.

Usually, Edric wouldn’t have bothered dancing around the issue like a bleeding child, or demurely waiting for whatever was keeping Varric to vanish. However, considering how much he relied on Varric these days, he decided not to rock the boat yet. If he didn’t at least have him to talk to, he was sure he’d go mad.

*

Edric had been exploring the castle when Cassandra caught up with him in the main bailey that afternoon. “A word,” she called to him. Edric stood. He could never tell for sure her whether she requested or ordered him to do things.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

Cassandra waved at him to follow her. Together, they ascended the stairs to a higher part of the castle, where Leliana was waiting on a landing. In her hands was a giant two-hander. She stepped towards him, arms outstretched, offering him the weapon.

“People see you as a leader. They come from every corner of the lands. Skyhold is the goal for pilgrimages now.” Cassandra sounded conflicted, but she soldiered on. “You gave them hope – and you gave _us_ hope as well. Now you must live up to that promise.”

“What do you expect me to do?” Edric asked warily.

“Make it official,” Leliana said softly. “Become the symbol that the people need: the Inquisitor.”

Edric looked up.

“Cassandra looks convinced.”

The stern human gave a brief flash of a smile

“You are not what I imagined,” she admitted, haltingly. “But I do believe that without you, the Inquisition would have ended at Haven. I accept that there is a plan greater than I can see now and you are evidently part of it.”

Again, Edric looked at the sharp edge of the blade, the intricate design of the pommel. This seemed like a weird idea, but did it really matter whether people called him the Herald or the Inquisitor? Both were positions he was desperately unsuited for. If this was what it took to keep spirits up or at least avoid an argument with the advisors, might as well.

“I guess someone better shove this up Corypheus’ ass,” he muttered to himself, as he grabbed the sword with both hands.

They walked along the perimeter of the low stone wall, Edric carefully trying to keep the sword upright. People had gathered in the courtyard and Cullen egged them on until the murmurs turned into cheers. When Leliana and Cassandra stopped, so did Edric. He turned to look downwards. The sword wasn’t too heavy for him, but at almost half again as long as him it felt ridiculously big and unwieldy in his hands, and that was coming from someone who’d fought with some seriously shitty weapons in his time, the kind thrown together by a smith’s apprentice on the third day.

“Raise it,” Leliana whispered.

Edric thrust the sword up into the air, hoping the gesture didn’t look as unbalanced as it felt.

“Your leader! Your Herald! Your Inquisitor!” Cullen shouted.

Hastily, Edric brought up his second hand as the giant sword almost slipped from his grip, threatening to topple onto the adoring masses.

*

Skyhold was giant mess. If anyone had lived here, and Edric still found it hard to believe the castle had been abandoned for centuries, they certainly hadn’t cleaned up in a while. Stones, broken beams and debris covered the throne room. While the advisors ran off to the do no doubt important things, Edric found himself lost in the giant building again, wondering what an Inquisitor’s job really was. Finally, he decided that it couldn’t hurt to get rid of the garbage.

He was in the middle of dislodging a rotting piece of wood that might once have been a bench from under the remains of a collapsed pillar when the noise of footsteps made him look up. Varric sauntered into the hall.

“How’s the throne feel, your Inquisitorialness?”

“Haven’t sat on it yet. Hold this.”

With a grunt, he yanked at the plank and handed it to Varric, making sure that he hadn’t just caused some structural damage that would leave the next person walking past the heap of rubble buried under an avalanche of broken bricks. However, it all stood fairly safe. He helped Varric manoeuvre the tall piece of wood to lean against the wall.

“So the Inquisitor spends his time cleaning up?” Varric asked.

“This one does,” Edric said and turned back to the rubble, mouth set in a tight line. “Got a problem with that?”

“I’m guessing Ruffles wouldn’t want you to do it in front of highborn visitors, but it seems reasonable to me. Besides, as Sera would remind us, a little work keeps one from looking down on the servants.” Stepping forward, Varric considered the rubble as well. “We should probably carry that to the door, at least, make it neat heaps so it can be brought down the stairs quickly.”

 _We_. Edric found his good mood briefly returning, handing Varric a half dozen bricks before grabbing double the amount for himself.

“That was pretty inspirational out there,” Varric noted.

“Was it? Good, then it didn’t show that I almost beheaded the first row of worshippers. Blighted sword – who the hell is supposed to use something like that, anyway? Were all the other Inquisitors Qunari?!”

Varric chuckled. “I think it’s more for ceremonial purposes. And if you looked a little unsteady, then I’m sure you have a chronicler who’s kind enough not to mention it,” he answered with a sly smile, pulling stones from the top of the heap.

“‘Ceremonial purposes’ – so it’s useless, then.” Edric shook his head. Waste of good metal. “You just happen to come by?” Edric added, after they had worked in silence for a moment. To his surprise, when he turned around, Varric looked a little sheepish. Before answering, he made sure that the bricks he’d placed down just now stood in perfectly even lines for no good reason Edric could see.

“No,” he said, like he was admitting to something. “Actually, I want you to meet someone who might help us. This evening, on the battlements... and maybe keep quiet about that meeting for now?”

Edric pulled hard to free a big broken cornerstone covered in moss. “Sure,” he said, before thinking. Everything he knew about the world said to him that this sounded shady, like a trap. However, he trusted Varric with his life – and that thought was pretty damn scary on its own, the moment he realised it was true.

*

The wind blew even harder on the battlements as the sun sank behind the old towers, but his armour protected Edric from the worst. He wore it as an act of quiet protest against the flimsy, silky, gold-studded nightgown-looking shit that had been laid out for him. At least no one could tell him his armour was inappropriate, since he walked around like this most of the time, anyway.

Varric waited for him, looking off to the side, where a small staircase led up to an even higher part of the wall. When he spotted Edric, he stretched out a hand, beckoning him closer. Then he turned back to the staircase, and Edric followed his example.

Striding towards them was a tall human with black hair and a black beard, a splash of red across his beak nose like war paint.

“Inquisitor, meet Hawke, the Champion of Kirkwall.”

Even Edric, who didn’t have a lot of time for heroes, found himself struck silent for a moment. Hawke looked just like Varric had described him in his book, straight back, serene face with dark, kind eyes eyes and, wearing an elaborate but obviously battle-worn armour, like he had just stepped straight out of the story.

“Though I don’t use that title much, anymore,” Hawke said, finishing Varric’s sentence. From the corner of his eye, Edric saw the other dwarf was smiling. That was true for Varric quite a lot of the time, but it had never looked that nervous, or that happy. The moment Hawke had reached them, Varric left Edric’s side to walk towards Hawke, who mindlessly squeezed his shoulder once. 

“I told the Inquisitor about-”

“Don’t call me that,” Edric blurted out, interrupting Varric. He guessed it was a sign of reverence to address him with his proper title in front of someone Edric had never met, even if after reading the _Tale of the Champion_ it felt like he had. However, standing in front of them – this stranger and the person Edric considered his closest ally – like the odd one out, it bothered him more than he cared to admit that Varric didn’t use his name or ‘salroka’, like he usually did.

Varric and Hawke exchanged a glance. It felt like Edric had just heard them talk in a language he didn’t know when all they’d done was look at each other.

“You see, he’s not one for all the trappings of heroism. I told _Edric_ about our fight with Corypheus and figured you might be able to give him a few more hints.”

Varric stepped back, allowing Hawke to approach Edric. For a moment there was just the wind howling like a wolf. Edric crossed his arms in front of his chest, unsure what to say.

“Guess Varric told you what we tried?”

“Yes, and it sounds like he got stronger to me. We fought him with just four people.”

“So what now?”

“I wish I could tell you. This is the first Tevinter magister I’ve met, too. But what we noticed when we fought him was that he had managed to turn the Wardens against each other with his magic.”

“He used the Darkspawn blood to mess with their minds,” Varric agreed.

“That’s why we’ve been talking and we think the Wardens might be under his control. After all, they’ve disappeared.”

“Don’t they do that?” Edric said, frowning. “Never saw much of them where it counted. Last Blight was stopped by two or three of ‘em. No idea where the rest were.”

“You must excuse Edric, he’s from Orzammar,” Varric said, raising a brow at Hawke. “And he’s not wrong, down there, they don’t count for much when it comes to beating back Darkspawn.” His gaze turned to Edric. “There were more Wardens at the battle with Loghain, though. The two we all know are just the only ones who made it out.”

“The Wardens have weakened in our times, but something like this should have drawn them here,” Hawke said decisively. “And if Corypheus has them, they’re a fearsome addition to his army.”

“That’s great,” Edric muttered. More meat shields on Corypheus’ side.

“I didn’t come this far just to give you bad news,” Hawke assured him. “I have a friend in the Wardens who was worried about corruption last time I talked to him about red lyrium.” Hawke glanced at Varric again and Edric knew for sure they’d talked about this before and were just catching him up. “He’s been silent for a while now, but I know he planned to hide out in an abandoned smuggler’s cave in Crestwood if things should go awry. That’s where we should meet again.”

Trying to process this information, Edric arrived at one end: “So does that mean we’ve got to wipe out the Wardens?”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” Varric said.

“Indeed, I would very much like to avoid that. But we must do what’s necessary. Corypheus is my responsibility.”

“He’s mine as well, Waffles. I was the one who kicked off this whole show by going into the Deep Roads with my brother. If we hadn’t found the idol...”

Edric wasn’t a soft-hearted guy, but the guilt in Varric’s voice made him want to reach out, say, well, something, make it better. Before he could think of anything, however, Hawke had stepped towards Varric.

“We’ll fix it together,” he said with conviction. “Just like we always did.”

They probably will, Edric thought, and why should that sting? Hadn’t he always just wanted to sit this one out, known this was all way over his head? Hawke was a real hero – Edric had read the blighted book himself. So how was it a surprise Varric seemed to be only smiling at him now?


	9. Chapter 9

Crestwood had been a dreary place even before the water had been drained to reveal the flooded old village, but looking at the mouldy remains of houses standing like broken teeth in the muddy ground did nothing to lift Edric’s spirits, either. As usual, people were more depressing than the ever-gray sky or hills and meadows that looked equally colourless,. The mayor had fled once they had uncovered the flooded village, leaving behind only a cowardly note that Edric could read rather quickly these days, thanks to Varric. As he turned the parchment in his hands, he wondered if he could use his soldiers to hunt Mayor Dedrick down. Did he have that authority?

“What a rat-bastard,” Varric mumbled.

Edric made a noncommittal noise. Varric was not from Orzammar. He didn’t know what it was like, living with the threat of the Blight sickness hanging over your head all the time. Dwarves were sturdier, but they weren’t immune, and Edric had seen his fair share of misty-eyed, ashen-skinned dwarves blindly stumbling after darkspawn like pet nugs.

“Have you ever had anyone taken by the Blight?” he asked, as they were stepping outside of the hut. The wet wind welcomed them like a slap in the face.

Varric hesitated, straightening the cuff of his leather coat. The Iron Bull was looking for clues in which direction Dedrick could have legged it, Sera trailing behind him.

“A friend, but it was his fault, not like these people here. Drank darkspawn blood.” Varric glanced to the side. “He was in the cult that lured Hawke in to wake Corypheus. Got what he wanted – not that it does him any good now. He tried to get at Hawke and I couldn’t let that happen, could I? He attacked us and we had to put him down, the idiot.”

Resentment mixed with melancholic fondness in Varric’s voice in a way that Edric didn’t think he’d have felt for someone who had tried to slit his throat. There was a softness inside Varric that he thought he should find more annoying than he did. Even that one evening when he’d been drunk enough to speak about his traitor brother, it hadn’t seemed to him like Varric could bring himself to truly hate him. It didn’t seem very useful to be this way, but Edric had an odd sort of respect for it.

“So you get it,” he said. “Sometimes there’s no choice. Back when I was a kid, creeping through the old tunnels searching for lyrium for the miners, it wasn’t so rare someone would get snatched. Could be you saw them again, just from a distance if you were lucky. The taint, it’s nothing to joke with.”

“Are you trying to tell me you think the mayor did the right thing?” Varric’s warm eyes grew wide.

“I’m just saying, I don’t know what I’d have done. At least it killed them quickly. But maybe getting rid of them is what he had to do to protect the others.” Edric pocketed the letter. “It’s the running that gets me. You make a decision like that, you don’t get to piss off and pretend it never happened. He should damn well be looking at those houses for the rest of his life.”

“Well, we agree on the last part.”

Bull and Sera had turned their way again, Bull shaking his massive, horned head to Edric’s unasked question.

“Sometimes, there’s no easy way,” Edric told Varric.

“No, but there’s some lines you can’t cross, or you’ll become the kind of person who leaves nothing but scorched earth in their wake. Trust me, I know the type. He rained down a chantry on my hometown.”

In some place in his stone heart, Edric knew Varric was right, but his optimism annoyed him because it made him feel like worse person for considering the mayor’s option and that guilt, in turn, made him more angry. Hadn’t he always told people that he wasn’t cut out for this hero business?

“Let’s go find Hawke,” he muttered, leaving Varric standing. The wet grass squelched under his heavy leather boots. “I’m sure he’d have known just what to do to save everyone, including the damn cats and dogs.”

*

They met Hawke’s Warden contact in a narrow cave about a league off the coast in the hills. Edric found himself wishing he wasn’t encased in cold sheets of metal as he stood there freezing, listening to a blond man with an easy smile tell them all about the Wardens, a story that in Edric’s mind basically amounted to the Wardens being yet another problem they would have to deal with rather than help in any way. He’d never had too high a regard for them, seeing as they sure had never helped Orzammar keep the Blight at bay, but at least a few fighters who’d dealt with darkspawn before would’ve been a nice addition to Edric’s team. Seemed like those legends of the Ferelden Blight really were either fairy tales or had been quite the outlier as far as usefulness of the Wardens went.

Hawke and Alistair decided to take off together so they could meet them later in the Western Approach, to make sure that it wasn’t the Wardens who would eventually tear down all their well-laid plans. Before he followed the former companion of the Hero of Ferelden, Hawke leaned down to hug Varric.

“I’m sure he is in good hands with you,” he told Edric with a friendly smile. “Keep him safe for me.”

“What? I’m the one making sure his Inquisitorialness’ head stays on his shoulders,” Varric said in mock indignation, patting Hawke on the back as the smile on his face wavered for a moment. “You make sure that you don’t end up a scorpion’s dinner, alright? I don’t feel like writing your final chapter yet.”

When Hawke was gone, Edric breathed a little easier. He knew it was stupid, all of it. Being jealous was childish and Hawke was support, but while he had the Champion of Kirkwall breathing down his neck, Edric had found it pretty difficult to just keep on keeping on the way he’d done it in the past. He wasn’t meant to lead a faction, but people still listened to him and it was easier to pretend to know what he was doing when he didn’t have someone very adept at the whole leader-of-the-people thing there to consider his every move.

“What do you think about this Warden-Commander’s plan?” Varric asked, as they trudged through a fine drizzle.

“Not much,” Edric said, shrugging his shoulder. “Sounds like blood magic and that’s generally bad news, so I guess we’ll have to do something about it.”

“Yeah, but do you think she’s just gone crazy with fear or do you think she’s got another plan?”

“What do you mean? Like Corypheus got her under mind control or something?”

“I bet that creepy bastard can do stuff like that,” Sera muttered. She kicked a small stone that rolled down the craggy hillside.

“You don’t need to control most peoples’ minds to convince them to do stupid things. You just have to make the right promises,” Iron Bull commented.

Edric snorted. “I guess. Doesn’t make a difference now, though, we have to stop her either way.” Sighing, he looked out onto the grey ocean in the distance, now drawn behind the houses of Old Crestwood. “I guess we better go clear out the rest of the bandits before we leave this village to its fate, though, or we’ll just return to find the rest of it looking like that, too.”

He nodded towards the skeletons of the drowned house. What Hawke and Alistair were doing scared his Ancestors awake, to be honest, but this was a task he could get to grips with – weed out a few bastards who harassed the farmers around some village in nowhere. Nice and simple.

When they made their way back to the shore, smoke coming from behind a cluster of old ruins up on a hill caught Edric’s attention. It wasn’t the right direction for where they had been told the bandit camp would be, but their targets weren’t nailed to the floor and after the Inquisition had cleared out Caer Bronach, they’d probably be a bit more careful and try to keep on the move, if they weren’t complete morons.

However, as they turned the corner of a crumbling wall, Edric only saw a woman in the robes of a Chantry sister standing beside a pyre, the wind tugging at her clothes, and a villager in a dirt-stained shirt kneeling and praying.

“Draw your last breath, my friends,” she said solemnly, looking into the flames. “Cross the Veil and the Fade and all the stars in the sky.”

“What’s going on here?” Edric asked, taking his hand off the handle off his sword.

The Chantry sister turned to him and bowed her head slightly. “You honour us, Inquisitor,” she said. “I am Sister Vaughn. We are trying to hold a funeral service, but – the dead from the bottom of the lake are missing.” Briefly, she closed her eyes. “They were the Maker’s children. Their earthly bodies deserve better than abandonment in a mire. If we could just have them here... a funeral service will help put living minds at ease.”

Though Edric didn’t think it mattered whether the corpses rotted, were left out for the animals or burned – the people they used to be probably didn’t care anymore –, he could see why this might be important for the villagers. On the other hand, he also understood why Vaughn wouldn’t wanna go into the formerly drowned village alone, seeing as it was still full of spirits and demons. As he stepped away, he thought that they could just as well walk a little circle into Old Crestwood on their way and see if they could find at least some of the remains.

*

It was dark when they returned to the newly established Inquisition camp in Caer Bronach and Edric climbed the ramparts. As he stood there looking between the merlons, he noticed smoke still curling skywards to the east, were Sister Vaughn was probably standing guard next to her fire.

“Well, if the Maker has a problem with wet applicants, they at least got to go to him now – even if it was a bit on the late side.”

Turning, Edric saw Varric with a wooden mug of what smelled like spiced mulled wine.

“Didn’t do it for the corpses,” he said. “But that Sister looked like she could use something to pick her up. Must be harsh, looking out onto all this every day. I sure know I want to get out of here as fast as I can leg it.”

He gave a wry grin. Yeah, maybe he wasn’t as heroic as Hawke, maybe he should’ve tried to make himself look better, but he couldn’t change his spots. Besides, what made being with Varric so easy was that he didn’t have to pretend in front of him.

Varric smiled briefly and heaved himself up onto a barrel to perch there.

“I don’t believe you’d have flooded that village, you know.”

Edric frowned.

“I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life.”

“So have I. Lots of them side by side with Hawke and my other friends. Let’s be honest, neither of us would be here slitting throats as frequently if we were all the way normal. But I think if you’d be faced with those refugees huddled up in the huts, if you really saw them – you wouldn’t.” He grinned. “Too soft-hearted.”

Edric didn’t know whether he was being insulted, but as he called the image Varric had given him before his mind, he wondered if he was right and whether that was a new development. Once you’d gotten the chance to help a few people for once in your sorry life, it was kind of easy to get used to it.

“I doubt it. That’d be the only thing about me that’s soft.”

Varric’s grin grew into a dirty chuckle.

“And all for me?” he joked.

Since Edric had only been talking of his muscle, he found himself briefly flustered. To play over it, he stepped in close. They hadn’t really talked about that night in the tent anymore, but Edric wasn’t one for talking, anyway. Instead, he pressed a kiss on Varric’s mouth.

Varric didn’t draw back. It was not a comfortable kiss, since Edric was still wearing plate armour and the drink Varric was holding had gotten awkwardly trapped between them, but it made sparks light in Edric’s ribcage.

“You could be right about the blighted village,” Edric muttered, as he drew back. “But if I had an iron fist to rule with, I’d at least make some sort of leader.”

“An effective one, maybe, but it’s up for debate whether that’s always preferable. It wouldn’t be one I’d like to follow,” Varric said, taking a sip of his wine and offering it to Edric. “Here, have a drink before bed. The bandits won’t make catching them easy and it’s gonna be a long ride to the Western Approach.”

If they wouldn’t all be sleeping huddled around the only fire in the keep in one room, Edric would have asked Varric to join him in his bed. Still, things being confusing as they were between them, he was simply happy that when he leaned in for another kiss after a gulp of wine, Varric didn’t turn his head away.


	10. Chapter 10

The battle of Adamant Fortress was fire and noise and fury. Edric had fought for most of his life; he’d been watching armies of darkspawn drag their prey through the deep when he had still been a little boy crawling through the Orzammar tunnels on behest of the higher castes for a little change to keep himself fed. A few times he had even seen skirmishes between them and the Legion of the Dead. Afterwards, when he’d grown too big for the tunnels but big enough to properly hold a sword, he’d taken to getting involved with whomever he was paid to attack.

However, the Cadash were smugglers. They did not employ their mercenaries as support for sieges or to bolster the private armies that served to solve the conflicts between the lords of the Free Marches. Even in Haven, the real battle had been going on away from him and the main bulk of Corypheus’ army found itself buried under an avalanche before it had a chance to reach him.

Edric had been in some terrible fights lately, fights with people and _creatures_ he’d never thought he’d survive at all – fearsome mages, corrupted Templars armed to the teeth, demons, Ferelden wildmen from the swamp, hoards of the undead – and those had been no stroll through the fields. This was a different kind of fighting, though. It was harder to concentrate when there were battles going on all around you as far as you could see, when the roof was coming down in flames, when the screams of the dying and wounded filled the air from all sides and every glance in every direction revealed corpses strewn over the ground.

Edric had grabbed Cassandra and Solas for this fight. One was an experienced soldier, the other level-headed to the point that it annoyed Edric. Today, as they clambered past dead Wardens along the battlement, breathing smoke and the iron smell of blood, he was happy for both their experience and tranquillity.

What surprised him was that Varric was trudging alongside them, trying to keep his eyes on the way ahead with more success than Edric.

“You’re doing pretty good for a merchant,” Edric said, both jealous and impressed.

“This reminds me of when the Chantry exploded in Kirkwall.” Varric smiled tightly. “So I’m used to this. I’ll just drink myself into a stupor later.”

“Make that two of us,” Edric murmured.

“Make that me hoping we get there,” Varric answered, letting his gaze wander upwards, were arrows were whizzing in a battle taking place on the battlements above them. Then, suddenly, he halted, almost making Cassandra stumble over him.

“I hate that I’m sort of an expert by this point, but that looks like a dragon to me – down!”

Varric pushed against Edric’s back and grabbed Solas’ arm. The four of them threw themselves onto the ground as the dragon dived for them, scorching the merlons with its fire. Edric heard its great leathery wings beating the air, felt the heat of the flames on his skin.

“Where is it heading?!” Cassandra called.

“It’s just circling overhead,” Solas said.

“So is it just looking for someone or waiting for a call?” Varric asked.

Heaving himself up in his heavy armour by leaning on his shield, Edric tried to follow the course of the dragon. Looking up at the sky made him dizzy again for the first time in a long while.

“Let’s go,” he said gruffly, knowing that if he stood to think about what was going on above their heads now, he wouldn’t move anymore.

-

“Everyone else spends their time sleeping here? Why would you ever sleep?”

Solas had given him a tiny glimpse at what Edric had figured must be the Fade when they had arrived in Skyhold, but that had just been a copy of Haven that had only begun scaring him a bit when he had woken up from his first ever dream. This Fade was nothing like that. It didn’t look like anything in the real world, but rather like it had wanted to be reality at some point but given up halfway, leaving it a strange, unfinished-looking collection of objects and places.

“Dreams can teach you much,” Solas said. “And not all of them are this frightful.”

Obviously, Solas was by far the one most at peace with their situation, even with the voice that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere whispering in Elvish to him that Edric didn’t understand. Knowing that this was where Solas escaped to for relaxation and fun made him mistrust the elf twice as much as he had before.

As Solas and Hawke led the way, with Cassandra bringing up the rear, nervously glancing around with her sword drawn and shield raised, Varric caught up to Edric’s side.

“What do you think of ‘Andraste’?”

Edric shrugged his shoulders. The others had seemed aghast with their meeting with the spirit that was the supposed Andraste, but Edric thought she was by far the least terrifying thing here.

“Never made sense to me why she’d choose me, anyway. I don’t even believe in the Maker. Lately, I’ve seen way more spirits than I ever wanted to, though. Even got one wandering ‘round with us, right? So why not, it’s one of the rare ones that’s not a complete ass.”

“Well, it was a nice touch to have you be the Herald of Andraste, though.”

“You just think that ‘cause you’re a storyteller,” Edric said, trying to ignore the strange, shadow-like people that were frozen by the wayside like statues, growing into the stones, looking both alive and inhumanly still.

“But stories is how you get things like the Inquisition going,” Varric protested. “Really, good propaganda is often nothing but targeted storytelling. Just the less truthful kind.”

“I’ve been telling everyone who wants to hear it I’m no Herald. People will just believe anything, anyhow. If they thought the Maker chose a dwarf, they won’t let this stop ‘em,” Edric said.

“But he wouldn’t,” the booming voice said, suddenly all around them again. “And if he would choose anyone, it wouldn’t be you, Edric. How did you become a Cadash again, bastard child? By slitting throats for criminals until they allowed you to wear your no-good’s father’s name?”

“Shut your blighted mouth,” Edric growled at nothing. The whole of the Fade seemed hostile to him, one giant animal lying in wait.

“How long do you think it will take until you finally make that misstep that will send the whole Inquisition to ruin, smuggler? Because you know it is going to happen.”

“He really takes every cheap shot, doesn’t he?” Varric muttered, next to him.

Edric didn’t answer. There were giant cave spiders ahead again, although they looked more malnourished and malicious than the real world versions he was used to. Even having protested right out of the gate that he was not the man for the job, no one wanted their own doubts laid out in front of the person who – shit, he didn’t even know. If he’d only wanted to sleep with Varric, it wouldn’t have been so difficult. He tried to banish the thought of his affection for him before whatever nightmare creature kept talking to them zeroed in on that, too.

-

Edric was still blinking blood out of his eyes when he stumbled to a halt, cursing loudly. In front of them, the creature that was guarding the rift in the Fade had come down again, cutting them off from their team. He threw a wild look over his shoulder to see who was stuck with him. Hawke and Alistair had been by his side holding off the enemies when they made a run for it, now standing with him in the green fog, the beast clicking its fangs and growling above them.

“Shit!” Edric shouted. “What now?”

“Go! I’ll cover you!” Hawke gave back, without a moment’s hesitation.

Before Edric could react, Alistair stepped up next to him. “No,” he said. “You were right. The Wardens caused this mess. A Warden must...”

“A Warden must help them rebuild! That’s _your_ job!” Hawke said, over Edric’s head. “Corypheus is mine.”

Both stood rooted to the spot, neither apparently ready to give up their duty, and now their gazes fell on Edric. For a moment he thought they wanted him to go sacrifice himself, but then remembered the Mark on his hand, which would still be needed. No, this was almost worst – they wanted him to make the decision who lived and who died.

His heart still going as fast as a fleeing rabbit’s, Edric looked up at and between the two men, feeling lost. As they stood there, the Warden’s companion and the Champion of Kirkwall, asking him which of them to send to his death in this no-wordly place, Edric felt incredibly small.

“Hawke,” he began, haltingly, because this was, after all, the man that Varric put so much faith in and he wondered if he could somehow help him with this impossible task.

However, Hawke just nodded his head.

“Say goodbye to Varric for me. I’ll hold it off as long as I can.”

Edric’s heart dropped into his stomach.

“But I-”

“Go!”

And then, there was suddenly no more time to discuss as the creature attacked. Hawke drew his sword and stormed out of their reach, hacking away at its tentacles, and Alistair grabbed Edric’s arm, pulling his petrified form a few steps until Edric’s feet started moving on their own. The last thing he saw was Hawke in his silver armour under the shadow of one of the monster’s tendrils, which was spilling its oddly coloured blood onto him as he cut a large gash into it, and then the darkness swallowed Edric.

There was a rest of smaller demons left fighting with the soldiers when Edric stumbled out at the other side of the rift. Automatically, he stretched out his hand and crushed them within the grasp of his magic.

He was still gasping for breath, letting his mind catch up with the enormity of what had just happened, when Alistair had already begun a rallying speech. Edric didn’t hear a word of it. With his stomach balled up to a fist, he was looking around for his companions.

It didn’t take long for him to spot Varric. Smeared head to toe with grime and blood, he stepped forward behind Cassandra, staring at him. He must’ve seen Edric’s face fall because his eyes widened in uncomprehending fear before Edric had said anything at all.

“Hawke is not with us anymore. He sacrificed his life to save us,” Alistair said, when Edric failed to form a sentence still, after a long moment of silence.

“Well...”

That was all Varric said before he turned and hurried away. For once, Edric had apparently rendered him speechless.


	11. Chapter 11

During their journey home, Varric remained silent at the tail end of the group. Everyone was too polite to bother him. Even if they didn’t know him very well, the Inquisition agents had all read the tale of the Champion of Kirkwall. You didn’t need to have seen the two of them together to understand just how important Hawke had been to Varric because you soaked that up with the words on the page.

Edric, too, had no idea what to say. He wasn’t much for comforting people; one look at his grim, scarred face was more likely to scare them than soothe them. Still, he had pretty broad shoulders to cry on, for the rare person that he cared enough about to let them do it. He was the one who’d lost Hawke for Varric, though, so he didn’t think he’d much of a leg to stand on trying to make it better now. In fact, it was worse than that – he’d effectively sent Hawke to his death when he could’ve spared him.

Cullen, though looking honestly sad for the loss of a powerful ally, had still congratulated him as soon as they had returned to Skyhold on his ability to keep a respected Warden alive in the Fade. Alistair, he claimed, would be able to reform what was left of their sorry mess of an order. Edric hadn’t corrected him. In the end, it really didn’t matter what Cullen believed Edric had done for which reason.

But it did matter what Varric knew, Edric decided, eventually. So far, Varric hadn’t been angry at him the few times they’d happened to talk, just closed-off and absent-minded. It surprised Edric that he wasn’t abolutely pissed, but maybe that was just because he knew the truth and Varric didn’t. Hawke was not the first to fall for the Inquisition’s cause, after all; they’d lost lots of soldiers at Haven.

His first thought had obviously been just to lie about the whole matter, but Edric soon realised that he wouldn’t be able to swing that. He’d feel too guilty looking Varric in the eye and telling him how sad it was they’d lost Hawke, what a terrible accident – no, he was no moral guardian, but a lie that big to someone he cared about needed a man both more skilled and ruthless than him. Besides, what if Varric ever talked to Alistair? He didn’t want that sword hanging above his head.

The evening after the day of their return, Edric walked down into the throne room feeling like there were stones in his stomach. Often enough, Varric would be chatting with Gatsi, the dwarf who collected the mosaic pieces they sometimes found, or be down at the Herald’s Rest with the other Inquisition members, or sitting at his table scribbling. Tonight, he was just leafing through a book without stopping to read anything.

“Varric, you got a minute?” Edric asked him, carefully. “We need to talk.”

He looked up.

“For you? Always, your Inquisitorialness.”

The nickname came with a lot less genuine mirth than usual.

Edric waved at him to follow and led him up the stairs to his private chamber. It was the biggest room that Edric had ever had to himself, although considering he had gone from sleeping on the streets of Dust Town as a child to moving from camp to camp and tavern to tavern during his life as a smuggler, that hadn’t been a high bar to hit.

“Nice place,” Varric commented, glancing at the bookcases.

“Guess so. Not sure what to do with all the space, to be honest,” Edric said with a brief shrug. “Never really owned much. Wasn’t a point to it.”

You got used to a certain lifestyle as a career thug – what little money you had was best spent in taverns and whorehouses, not kept on your person, where it could be stolen or become loot for the guy who’d manage to slit your throat tomorrow. The one thing you could sensibly spend gold on was good gear, but even that was probably going to be taken off of you or your corpse.

“I’ve always had many books, so I this is my kind of room,” Varric said, distractedly, stepping over to the large, closed doors to the balcony, glancing outside.

Edric wanted to say something but didn’t. He didn’t like not knowing if this was the last time he’d have Varric look relaxed in his presence. He was wearing his civilian clothing today, reminding him just how familiar they actually were, reminding him of the kiss. Edric had gotten so used to the high-collar rogue’s leather armour that it had been easy to forget Varric preferred golden jewellery and colourful threads – for a good reason ‘cause they did look damn pretty on him.

“You’re doing very little speaking for someone who wanted to talk,” Varric noted.

Usually there would have been a smile, but he didn’t seem quite able to convince himself to try for one.

In his head, Edric kicked himself in the ass for being so tongue-tied.

“Hawke,” he managed. “It’s about Hawke.”

“Alright…”

Varric’s expression grew cautious. There had been a flinch at the mention of the name, as if Edric has jabbed him roughly.

“I want to tell you what happened.”

They stood in the fading light of a cold, early evening. The lattice in front of the window threw restless shadows on Varric. He waited quietly.

“The thing cut us off when we were running after you,” Edric began.

“I figured as much,” Varric said with a nod while Edric wondered if he’d wanted to ask and just not worked up the stones. “So he – died while you were fighting your way out?”

“No, not exactly,” Edric said.

With a frown, he opened one of the doors and stepped out onto the balcony. He wasn’t used to confessions, he wasn’t used to apologies, either. He certainly wasn’t used to meaning it. He hadn’t been fond of Hawke while he’d been around, but he was old enough to admit to himself he’d mostly just been jealous of his relationship with Varric and the fact that Hawke had taken to the fate that had been thrust onto him with so much more grace than Edric himself. He wasn’t just responsible for the death of Varric’s best friend, he’d also robbed Thedas of a good man.

“Alistair and Hawke figured the only way we could get out was if one person stayed back to distract that monster while the other two of us made a run for it.”

He stared out over Skyhold, breathing the icy air, looking at lights behind windows burning all over the old castle. Varric was leaning next to him against the balustrade, holding on too tight with one hand.

“What with me having this thing,” he flexed the hand with the rift, “I wasn’t an option, but both of them volunteered and they asked me to say what I thought. I just,” he faltered, “I just wanted to ask Hawke again, I mean, he seemed like he generally had a handle on things, right? But as soon as I said his name…”

A flash of rage crossed Varric’s face as he looked at him, but it dissipated as soon as it had appeared. Varric made a noise that sounded vaguely like a strangled laugh and turned away.

“Yeah,” he said, his voice rough, “that sounds like Hawke. He wouldn’t have liked leaving anyone else behind.”

“I’m sorry, Varric. I know that’s not worth anything now, but – shit – I really am.”

Varric looked at him for a long moment, then shook his head.

“There wasn’t a good choice,” he said. “I wish Hawke was here, I want this to not have happened, but just because I don’t know Alistair very well doesn’t mean that he deserved to die more than him.” He sighed. “I wish I hadn’t run ahead with the others.”

“It’s not your fault,” Edric said. “It’s mine, so – don’t put that on yourself.”

“I was the one who decided to call Hawke for help,” Varric said, tugging the golden rim of his shirt to close it against the cold and looking absolutely miserable. “Should’ve trusted my gut and just not let him come at all.”

“After all you’ve told me about him, d’you think he’d have liked that?”

A small smile tugged at the corners of Varric’s mouth.

“No, I guess you’re right,” he admitted, glancing into the garden, were a few people where wandering with lanterns. “You know, one time, we were out on the way to Merrill’s clan to get something from their woodworker when we ran into this small group of elves. They were a band of Dalish mages – you know, basically the kids they leave out in the forest so the Templars don’t come down on them, only all grown up.”

Varric’s voice was failing a little at the end of his sentences, although he was still smiling.

“Hawke knew there’d just be trouble if they happened upon the clan, so he offered to escort them in a circle around, since giving directions is a bit difficult out where everything is grass and trees and rocks. We spent the day fighting off bears with a group of woodland mages for… pretty much no reason at all. That’s just who Hawke was.”

His voice broke on the final words and Edric stood there awkwardly, hesitating a moment before he put his arm around Varric’s shoulders, feeling guilty, sad and relieved.

Varric didn’t really make much of a show of crying, but that figured. Edric had noticed that for how boisterous he was, he really didn’t seem to like it very much when people poked behind all the bluster and jokes. Edric didn’t think that it was a mask, it was just what he preferred people not to see and that was alright. Edric wouldn’t have people know he was here hugging Varric to himself, either, because he enjoyed it when their respect was laced with a little bit of fear – usually worked better. Varric was allowed to know him like this, though.

When Varric had calmed down, he wiped his face with the back of his hand and took a deep breath. They stood in silence for a moment.

“We good?” Edric asked, hesitant.

“Yes.” Varric cocked his head. “Thank you for telling me what happened. It was not your fault, either, you know. I think Hawke made that decision.”

Edric grunted, unconvinced, but chose not to argue. “Hawke told me to say goodbye to you from him,” Edric said, quietly.

Varric smiled, sniffing and looking into Edric’s room.

“We should play some Wicked Grace with everyone soon. Things have gotten pretty dark lately. Might be good for morale.”

“Yeah,” Edric said, happy to see Varric trying to get himself back on his feet. He was a tough one, that one. He squeezed him once more before he let go.

-

“Can you bring Erimond before me for judgement?”

Surprised, the three advisors looked up from the war table at Edric. Maybe he should have taken it as an insult that they were so spooked he wanted to do his job, but Edric didn’t exactly wonder why. Sitting on a throne in judgement had felt like exactly the spot where someone like Edric shouldn’t be. How was he supposed to know if they still needed these people or if they were a danger? The last time, Edric had wanted to take that crazy time time mage’s head off, but Leliana had quickly talked him into using him for the Inquisition instead. While so far that hadn’t gone sideways as Edric had expected it would right away, he was still uneasy with the decision and he’d left Erimond to languish in his cell for quite a while now while he contemplated what to do with him.

However, Edric had now had a very hands-on show of what his indecision could lead to. If he was going to have to make these choices, he would rather that he’d have to feel bad about the ones he’d actually made than those he’d stumbled towards or had let himself be pushed into.

“I want to hear him today.”

“Yes,” Cullen said. “We can bring him at once.”

“Do you know what you plan to do?” Leliana asked.

“What are the options?”

“You could just keep him in our prison indefinitely,” she offered.

“That’s not much of a solution,” Edric said. It wasn’t even a sure thing there would be an Inquisition to guard him there in a year’s time.

“There’s also the option of making him tranquil,” Josephine said, “although I doubt that our allied mages would like that.”

“Execution is certainly the most definite decision, if nothing else,” Cullen noted.

“We could also remand him to the Wardens,” Josephine said. “They were the ones who he did greatest damage to.”

“Let’s hear what he has to say for himself,” Edric decided, to resist the urge to make a decision here and escape the open spectacle in his throne room. Some things had to be done publically to really take, he knew that. People wanted to know what was going to happen to Erimond, and crowds wanted to witness punishment.

Once outside, he approached the large throne, biting down on his trepidation. With its high back and wide seat, the thing dwarfed him when he sat down on it, the Seekers’ eye staring away over his head onto the hall. He pretended not to feel like he looked ridiculous as he sat and waited.

Erimond was followed by a large throng of spectators, joining those who had already lined the walls of the throne room, well aware that Edric never sat on this damned chair if it wasn’t for an important reason. Varric, too, had gotten up from his table and found himself a place closer to the throne, looking on with interest.

Two Inquisition agents held his arms fast to the left and right, but Erimond looked anything but daunted as he was brought before Edric. Josephine approached the throne.

“Adamant’s influence continues, your Worship. I submit Lord Livius Erimond of Vyrantium, who remains loyal to Corypheus,” she said, in a grave, strong voice that filled the hall. “We found him alive, offering extreme resistance, likely because the Order will ask for his head. In more colourful terms.”

That Edric had already heard about because two Inquisition agents had lost their lives finally putting this cockroach in chains.

“To say nothing of justice you might personally require for what was suffered in the Fade,” Josephine added, as Edric stared down at Erimond. His gaze flicked to Varric for just a moment. There was fire in his eyes as he looked at Erimond.

The hall fell quiet and Edric realised it was his time to speak. He resisted the urge to clear his throat.

“Gimme a good reason to let you live because right now I can’t see one,” he told Erimond and as he remembered the chaos and bloodshed of the battle of Adamant, watching Hawke dive towards the giant demon, he suddenly didn’t have any trouble to speak loud enough to make himself heard.

“I recognize none of this proceeding. You have no authority to judge me.”

That was completely true, but the fact that Erimond was such an irredeemable rat-bastard that you needed only eyes to judge him kept Edric from looking uncomfortable. Thankfully, Josephine jumped in.

“On the contrary, many officials have communicated that they will defer to the Inquisitor on this matter.”

“Because they fear,” Erimond answered. “Not _just_ Corypheus, but Tevinter, rightful ruler of every piece of ground you’ve trod in your pathetic life.” He straightened himself. “I served a living god. Bring down your blades and free me from the physical. Glory awaits me.”

If he hadn’t been so dangerous, Edric might’ve almost pitied the man. He’d seemed so great and terrifying when he’d first met him, but now, as he stood there blathering about his god, he was just a madman, no better than the sods who drowned their lives in drink or Lyrium.

“Some god you have that can’t even wipe out a mountain camp of a few hundred people with a whole army. I’ll wager you I know men and women in the Carta who could have swung that,” Edric said. From the look Josephine threw him, he knew he shouldn’t have alluded to his undesirable connections, but it wasn’t like he’d ever hid his name or like Marchers, at the very least, didn’t know who the Cadash were.

Edric considered the man again. There was a temptation to just punt the whole issue on towards the Wardens, but even with Alistair in charge, warning bells were shrill in Edric’s head. The Wardens had not proven themselves very reliable. Besides, Erimond was already here and already enraging. Why prolong the inevitable and give him another chance to bolt?

“I wouldn’t want to keep you from glory. Unless your god swoops in here to save you himself, you’ll die today.”

“Petty actions. Truth lies in the next world,” Erimond insisted.

“Well, then this shouldn’t trouble you at all,” Edric answered. He turned to Cullen. “Tell your men to bring him outside.”

Once Erimond had been dragged from the hall, Edric got up. From the corner of his eyes, he saw Varric speaking to Josephine. She nodded her head before she hurried out of the hall. Edric filtered out of the large doors among the people, noticing that they left him a bubble of space.

Up on a wooden platform, Erimond was waiting, the cold wind blowing his black hair about. Snow swirled in small flakes above the waiting masses. Edric was just about to ask Cullen to lend him his sword when a slender hand tapped him on the shoulder. Turning, he saw Josephine carrying the tall blade they had once used to mark him as Inquisitor in Skyhold. He had only seen it that one time that he’d lifted it over his head; it was really too big for a dwarf to wield properly in a fight.

“Varric said it might be good for you to use this – to mark the occassion.”

“Yeah,” Edric said, taking the sword from her. It was still unwieldy, but hitting a kneeling target didn’t need a lot of talent or balance. Leave it to Varric to think about a way to make this remarkable for a retelling. “Why not?”

Walking up the steps, he felt hundreds of eyes on him, including Erimond’s. He was looking at him with defiance that couldn’t quite hide the fear as he shifted on his knees. Not quite that sure of his glory, then, Edric thought smugly to himself.

Maybe it was expected of him to make a speech, but Edric though Erimond had pretty much given them all the reasons why he needed to be gone on a silver platter. He looked out briefly over the audience, feeling strange. Killing was not new to him, but he’d never yet murdered someone for a higher cause than the gold he’d earn if he finished his job. There had just never been a lot else than fighting that he happened to be terribly good at.

Lifting the sword over his head, Edric looked at Erimond’s bowed neck. This time, at least, he felt fairly sure that through his grizzly act, he was relieving the world of one blighted bastard that would cause more harm than good – one even worse than Edric himself.

The sword came down and blood splattered onto his arms, staining the soft, cream-coloured threads Josephine made him wear, the blood showing dark on the bright fabric. He’d always told her those weren’t warrior’s clothes.


	12. Chapter 12

Val Royeaux was one of the prettiest places that Edric had ever been to. He admired the architecture, which reminded him just a little bit of the high halls of Orzammar, and it seemed like everyone was dressed in silks and pearls. Of course, that also made him wonder straightaway where the Dust Town to this Diamond Quarter was, to put it in Orzammar terms. If he knew one thing about society, it was that you never had one without the other.

They were making camp close by and Edric had decided that he would drop by Val Royeaux for supplies. Sera, city kid that she was, had jumped on the chance to get back to civilisation. Varric, who would usually have been right there with her for the same reason, had at least allowed Edric to talk him into it and even made an effort to give him a pale smile every once in a while.

“What’s the point of these masks now?” Edric asked his two companions, glancing at a gaggle of nobles.

“They wear those because they’re snobbish morons,” Sera answered.

“Yeah, but we’ve got those in Orzammar and the Marches, too, and they don’t run around looking like fools,” Edric said, half because he was interested and half because he was hoping to get Varric to talk. He looked at him and let the silence linger.

“It’s considered rude for the nobles to be out and about without a mask in Orlais,” Varric supplied, as he’d hoped, after Edric had stared at him for long enough. “I think the idea is that the world is a masquerade and everyone lies, anyway, so you might as well make it clear you’re aware of that.”

“That’s pretentious as shit,” Sera muttered.

“You could also call it poetic. Although considering most Orlesians I’ve met, I’m not quite sure I would, either. They don’t seem to quite grasp that element. It’s mostly just fashion by this point.”

They were marching onto the main plaza towards a large, round building with golden lions guarding its steps.

“There is a practical element to it. Most houses will work their heraldic symbols into their masks, so if you know what you’re looking for, you can spot them and their servants pretty easily.”

“I get them on shields so you don’t cut your own lord’s throat in the thick of battle, but why run around with your symbols in a city?” Edric asked.

“Recognition, of course, so everyone can see exactly who you are.”

“You’d think the cost of their clothes would get them looked at enough. Seems like a good way to draw trouble down on you, anyway,” Edric said, running a hand over his beard. “What noble family doesn’t have enemies who’d like to snatch one of their servants for info?”

“Like painting a big target right on your stupid face,” Sera agreed.

“It does seem like visiting Darktown in your best clothes – but you’ll have to ask Lelianna how that all fits together.” Varric shrugged. “I’ve never truly gotten ‘the Game’, either. Maybe we think too much like crooks, but it’d be news to me that Orleasian nobles are in any way above kidnapping rival servants in a pinch.”

“Well, we just know better than these posh arses,” Sera claimed.

“It’s true, we might simply not be of good enough breeding to understand them, but it does give us a leg up over them sometimes,” Varric agreed. “I’ve made use of that effect before.”

“Says the merchant prince,” Edric snorted, with a grin.

“Prince?” With little amusement, Sera’s gaze fell on Varric. “What are _you_ a prince of?”

“Nothing but bank accounts”, Varric assured her. “Ask your friends in Orzammar how much being a merchant prince really means, salroka, considering I’m a cloudgazing surfacer.”

“That’s both of us, though. The stone won’t take me either when I’m gone.”

“What are you guys on about?” Sera asked, falling down on a bench and fiddling with the leaves of a carefully cut bush in a pot.

“Orzammar. Dwarves who’ve been upstairs are supposedly not taken by the stone anymore when they are dead. It’s a religious thing, sort of. I don’t know where we go when we die, but the more immediate problem is that Orzammar dwarves would rather eat spoiled nug than have anything to do with us surfacers,” Varric said. “At least that’s what they say to our faces. They still need us for trade of the official and, as with our friend the Herald’s former business ventures here, unofficial kind.”

Sitting down next to Sera, Edric was happy to hear Varric talking a little more again. He’d missed his casual wit and even just the sound of his voice.

“They sound like wood elfies. Elitist bastards,” Sera muttered. “I’m happy we don’t got one of these types as our Inquisitor, you know that? You’re alright.”

“That makes one person who likes me in this position,” Edric grunted.

“Oh, make that two,” Varric said, generously, raising his hand.

Edric had to work to keep a stupid smile off his face.

“You wanna go have a drink before we get the supplies?” he asked the two of them.

*

“I always know that something is going severely wrong when _I_ am the voice of reason,” Varric said. He ducked behind a spectacularly adorned stone archway next to Edric. They were watching Sera draw her bow and aim for one of the what she had called ‘ridiculous, stupid, pompous’ wall-hangings with lion blazons hanging over the stones of a private mansion. Her dislike seemed to stem mostly from some gossip she’d at some point gleaned from her Red Jenny friends, who had gotten a lot of complaints from this family’s apparently mistreated servants.

“So stop being that,” Sera said, glancing over her shoulder.

“I’m just saying we don’t have a _really_ good occasion to start shooting at someone’s banners. Orleasians take these kinds of things pretty serious. If you wear their livery without belonging to their house, they might just decide to kill you for it.”

“Yeah, well, all the more reason to do it if they’ve got such sticks up their arses!” Sera announced. “Sides, we’ll just not get caught. We all know you just don’t wanna do it ‘cause you know I’m a better shot than you. I could hit one of those lions right in the face.”

One of Varric’s brows arched.

“Now, now, Daisy, there’s no need to lie.”

“Hah!” Sera just shot back. “So prove it!”

With a roll of his eyes, Varric looked at Edric, but he just shrugged his shoulders.

“Gotta put your money where your mouth is,” he said.

“You are not a good influence.”

However, Varric grabbed Bianca from his back and positioned himself next to Sera.

“Alright, let’s decorate these banners – if you can.”

Sera was the first to take aim. Edric narrowed his eyes to watch the path of the arrow that whirred through the air. It hit a blazon under a window and pierced it, sticking halfway out of the no doubt expensive fabric right where the lion’s mouth was.

“Near miss,” Varric said with a shrug of his shoulders.

“See you do it better?” Sera prompted.

Edric leaned forward to see where Varric’s bolt landed. After a click, it shot off and embedded itself in a lion’s eye.

“Luck,” Sera claimed. “Now I’ll show you what aiming is.”

They had to have been standing there for five minutes when, down the winding, multi-story roads of Val Royeaux, someone shouted up to them.

“City guard! Stop right there!”

Cackling, Sera jumped backwards and slapped Varric on the shoulder before waving at Edric.

“Come on, come on! Let’s go!”

They sprinted down the balcony street, Edric behind his two fleet-footed companions.

“Did he see you?” Edric asked.

“He couldn’t have, we were too far up,” Varric said over his shoulder..

“So we just gotta get away from here to – hey, there!”

Edric had noticed a low rooftop which went on flat for a few feet before sloping onto the street level below. He jumped the balustrade, landing hard. The two archers followed him with considerably more grace and chased down the length of the roof behind him. With just a brief look at the street, too short to start having second thoughts, he slid down the slanting rooftop , falling on his ass on the stone ground.

Grunting, he got up, just as Sera and Varric landed next to him. They hurried along until they found one of the elevators and let themselves be wheeled down into a wide street with white-washed houses and shops, the occasional well-dressed groups of tall humans providing the perfect crowd for two dwarves and an elf to get lost in.

“I think that should be far enough,” Edric said, glancing over his shoulder.

“I haven’t done something like that in… well, alright, I can’t claim I haven’t done it since I was a boy, but not since joining the Inquisition,” Varric huffed, chuckling breathlessly.

“Same on both for me,” Edric answered, grinning.

“I do this kind of stuff all the time! You two gotta learn to live a little,” Sera claimed.

Varric shook his head and pushed a blond strand behind his ear.

“They’re probably going to blame this on a rival family,” he said. “Whichever one they currently want to have a reason to be angry at.”

“Good!” Sera exclaimed, striding before them.

Edric and Varric hung back a little. They should probably go get those supplies already before the shops closed, Edric thought; with fall almost nearing its end, the sun was already almost lost behind the houses, and soon the stores would close.

“Thank you,” Varric said, pulling Edric from his thoughts.

“What?”

“For taking me along. Don’t get me wrong, I like most of your entourage, but it was good to get away from all the campsite fires and Archdemon tales and… other things.”

Memories, Edric guessed. He slapped Varric on the back since he couldn’t think of something to say.

Sera had skipped ahead to peer into a window and Edric was just looking after her when Varric grabbed his shoulder and half-turned him, kissing him on the corner of the mouth before quickly letting go and catching up to her.

Maybe, at some point, he’d have to stop running from himself like a coward and realise that he really was in love with Varric after all, Edric thought, as he followed him down the street.


	13. Chapter 13

The Exalted Plains were one of the most miserable places Edric thought they’d visited yet and that included the village of the dead in Crestwood and the Fallow Mire. While those had been disturbing, this shit here was depressing. Everywhere they went, they found flame-cut shells of houses and blood-smeared trenches. The grass was burned black and trampled to mud where Orlesian armies had fought. At the edges of the forest, trees had been hacked down by the hundreds, probably to erect the make-shift palisades which they found splintered on the ground.

One Sergeant Meursault, who he met in a fort, asked Edric to keep a look out for letters on the bodies of dead soldiers, just in case there was anything to return to their families. In Edric’s mind, that set the tone for their journey through the Exalted Plains – it was a place left with little else but scattered remains.

“What’s happening here, anyway? Why are the Orlesians fighting?” Edric asked, as they trudged through a field towards a spot his agents had marked on a map as a decent possible Inquisition campsite.

“It’s called the War of the Lions,” Varric said. “Empress Celene and her cousin Grand Duke Gaspard de Chalons are fighting for control over Orlais. The name is derived from their sigil animals, I believe. I imagine future historians will find it very handy that no one with a tree and a bridge on their shields started fighting instead. Much less poetic.”

“Is that the people whose house we fired our arrows at in Val Royeaux?” Sera asked.

“No, those were red lions. I believe Celene’s are golden and Gaspard’s black,” Varric answered.

“Too bad,” Sera muttered. “They’d have deserved it for this. Just stomping all over the little people because they want power.”

“Damn right,” Edric grunted.

The battle of Adamant had shocked Edric, this just pissed him off. It all seemed unnecessary. Sure, now, because of the tears in the Veil, there were blighted undead all over the Exalted Plains, but that wasn’t the reason they’d started fighting. There’d been no blood mages, no dragon screaming overhead, no demonic threats looming, just some pompous assholes mauling each other for power.

“War is always ugly, but civil war is the worst kind. You can’t pretend there’s any glory in it, fighting the people you used to sit around a table with,” the Iron Bull said.

“As far as I know Gaspard has some legitimate criticisms of Celene’s leadership, and she has some legitimate criticism of his thinly veiled assassination attempts of her. It’s a mess,” Varric added.

“Shit, you’ll have to tell me more about these jesters when we’ve got time,” Edric grumbled. “I think we got an invitation for some ball of theirs. They’ll probably spread their fight that far, too.”

“Are you going to take the three of us?” Varric asked, laughter in his voice. “That’d be something for the Orlesians to see, at least – two dwarves, an elf and a qunari.”

“Maker, no! I’m not coming along to some pox-ridden Orlesian festival!” Sera said, sticking out her tongue.

“Think of the pranks you could play,” the Iron Bull noted with a grin.

“Not even worth it,” Sera muttered, although the thought seemed to give her pause.

Edric felt similar anger. He was no freedom fighter like her, but bastards like that had been walking all over his kind for as long as he could think, too – people born into higher ranks, or, among dwarves, castes, who thought their very blood gave them the right to fuck up everyone else’s life in an attempt to win an argument with whichever other family of highborn fools they had gotten into a scrap with.

He would have asked a couple more questions about the lions who were leading the fight, but just at that moment, he heard a scream and the clash of metal.

Usually, Edric would have walked a circle around any confrontation he wasn’t actually a part of, maybe checked briefly if there was a rift involved that made it his responsibility, but skirted squabbling bandits or fighting groups of mages and Templars. However, after walking past this many corpses, he was furious enough to want to get his hands dirty regardless of what was going on.

He halted sharply and pointed at Varric.

“Go have a look.”

Like many who weren’t made for the frontlines, Varric knew how to hide himself better than Edric or the Iron Bull did. Sera had invested her training more in sharpshooting than subterfuge. Her cheerful screams when she hit a target would have drawn attention anyway and she was still quick enough to evade blows, so it didn’t matter to Edric. It was useful to have someone in Varric who could scout ahead undetected, though.

Varric hurried up the hill, looking out from behind the cover of brambles at its top. After a few seconds, he glanced over his shoulder.

“Got chevaliers hunting down what looks like villagers – they don’t have armour or weapons.”

“Let’s go get ‘em!” Sera shouted, already sprinting forward.

Edric shrugged his shoulders and followed.

They had the advantage of surprise. The chevaliers had obviously been looking to harass some easy targets and when four enemies appeared armed to the teeth, they lost all semblance of formation and scattered in a panic. There was still a full dozen of them, though, Edric counted as he whirled around and smashed his shield into a tall human’s chest, pushing him back, and these guys didn’t have the villagers to worry about. Edric almost stumbled over one backwards as he fielded a chevalier’s blow. A young man had fallen and now laid on the ground, staring up at the two men in heavy armour with panic twisting his face.

Reflexively, Edric raised his shield as the next blow came down, but then found the sword had almost passed him by anyway, going for the kid in the grass. The boy had only lived because the chevalier’s sword glanced off the edge Edric’s shield by accident and was diverted from its course.

Powered by a sudden burst of rage, Edric threw himself forward, but he couldn’t budge the human, who had fifty pounds and too many inches on him. Again, the sword came down. This time the blade embedded itself in Edric’s right cheek, cutting across his nose, missing his eye by half a hair’s breadth.

Pain exploded in his skull. He stumbled blindly backwards, trying to keep himself above the boy on the ground.

Something zipped through the air and the chevalier groaned, a muffled sound under his helm. A bolt had found the gap in his armour when he’d raised his arm to strike again. His one moment of disrorientation was all Edric needed. Off-balance as the chevalier was, he was now easy for Edric to bring to the ground. The human went down face-first and that was how he died when Edric pulled off his helmet and brought his blade down on his neck.

“Go, run!” Varric said, suddenly next to him, pulling the boy up by his arm. Still shell-shocked, the young man stumbled towards the villagers huddled by the edge of the river, trying to keep out of the way of the fighting still going on.

Edric felt blood welling from the wound and running down his face, into his beard. He looked for Varric, who had begun shooting at another chevalier headed straight for them. Edric got to his feet and stepped forward, ramming his boots into the earth as he stood in front of Varric. He held his shield slightly sideways, keeping as much of Varric covered as he could without blocking Bianca while raising his own sword.

The man never reached them. Bull barrelled into him from the side with the force of an avalanche racing down a hillside. Edric joined the freight with him.

It didn’t take long for them to clean up the rest. By the time they had, Edric’s whole face was burning. Furiously, he wiped at the wound, and, dropping his hand, found it colliding with Varric’s arm. The other dwarf held a small glass bottle filled with swirling red liquid to him.

“Bottoms up,” Varric suggested.

While he chugged the potion, Edric looked over his shoulder. The villagers still stood hiding behind a low cluster of boulders by the river bank. The young man was in the arms of an old woman, her face stained with dirt and tears. They looked at Edric and his friends in frightened, somewhat hopeful confusion.

“That campsite the agents talked about isn’t too far away. Should we just take them?” Sera asked.

*

It was a busier camp than usual with the villagers having their wounds tended to and Inquisition agents fortifying the encampment to make sure that the chevaliers were not going to ambush them, too. Edric left them all to their own devices as soon as he could, uncomfortable with the villagers’ gratitude. He wondered if that feeling would ever stop; that even when he didn’t screw up, he wondered how long it would take people to figure out that he had done so many times in the past.

He’d drawn back into his tent to take off his armour, feeling light as a leaf in the wind without its well-known weight as he made his way across the bustling camp. Though he didn’t look to get in a fight in a shirt and leather trousers, he still wore his sword on his belt. Even this close to an Inquisition campsite, he might still manage to find trouble.

As he turned the corner of a rocky cliff to the narrow pebble stone beach of the riverbank, he found that he wasn’t the only one who had wanted to wash off the day’s blood and grime. Varric was standing a little further down the stream, where the river ran deeper, up to his chest in water and inspecting a something on the bank.

Edric pulled off his clothes and waded into the water, his sword still in hand, shivering at the sudden cold enveloping him. The noise alerted Varric, but the startled expression on his face melted away when he recognised Edric.

“Do you always bathe with a weapon in hand, salroka? That seems uncomfortable.”

“It’s safer.”

Edric put the sword down on the edge of the bank next to Varric when he had reached him.

“What’re you looking at?”

“Just thought I’d seen Elfroot. Now that you’ve gone into the business of unnecessary heroics, we might need some more.”

“‘s just pisses me off, that’s all,” Edric grunted. “Chevaliers think they can do whatever here just because it’s not like anybody will know or care, right? It’s just some peasants. If there’s a few more or less, no one important will break a nail over that.”

It hit way too close to home. Edric cupped some water into his hands and splashed it in his face.

“Well, _you_ noticed. And you’re pretty important at this point.”

It occurred to Edric that, when he’d been a brat in Dust Town, he had often dreamed of something like this, having his own army and people who listened to him. That was, of course, before he was old enough to know about all the many pitfalls of responsibility.

“You know, the Orlesians here will raze the country for a little more control. Meanwhile, this shit just _happened_ to me,” Edric said, raising the hand with the mark.

“It didn’t just happen to you,” Varric answered, running his wet hand through the blond hair hanging loose over his shoulders, a look that Edric found very appealing on him. “Sure, it was an accident. But you are a pretty big part of it all now, considering. If you hadn’t stepped up, we’d all already be dead or bowing before some Old God or whatever else you saw in our future.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Besides, maybe it’s not so bad this mark didn’t go to someone who’s really convinced that being a leader of people was always their birthright. These kinds can be more dangerous than those who just don’t have a plan.”

Slowly, Edric nodded his head. He still didn’t think he should’ve been the pick, but he did agree some posh noble who’d just been waiting for their chance wouldn’t have done so great, either. He wiped his hand over his face again, enjoying the cool water on the wound, which was already half-healed thanks to the potion.

“That’s going to leave a scar,” Varric said, looking him in the face.

“What difference does it make?” Edric asked, grinning under his beard. His face was a crisscrossed wasteland of badly healed skin. On his body, too, there were too many reminders of past fights to count. Varric, for his part, had a few old and new cuts, more than you’d expect on such a pretty face with his gold earrings and chain, but on a whole he looked much less a warrior than Edric.

“Good thing they didn’t take your eyes out with that strike, you seem to enjoy the view,” Varric said, bemused, folding his arms in front of his hairy chest.

“Can’t blame me. Haven’t kissed that much without fucking afterwards since I was twelve,” Edric gave back, more blunt than he needed to be because it was easier to hide he was a little nervous like that. They hadn’t really talked about whatever it was between them yet.

“Is that so?” Varric chuckled. “Pretty unfair, to have to play the hero against your will and not even get to share the bed with someone. But where will we get a suitably pretty maiden to fit the hero’s story?”

“I never was one for maidens,” Edric said, stepping forward and pressing their mouths together.

Under his hands, Edric found Varric’s muscle moving smooth like that of a cat, leaner than his own. He needed broad shoulders and a firm grip to fire that giant crossbow of his, but speed and agility gained him more on the battlefield, and he was built to match, Edric noticed as he let his hand wander downwards, touching his thick, sinewy thighs under water.

Varric pulled out of the kiss, smiling at him.

“We should probably go someplace where you don’t need your sword – well, not the one made of metal, anyway. It would be a pretty inglorious end for the Inquisitor to be killed by chevaliers while he’s fornicating with questionable company.”

Edric laughed, letting go of Varric to grab his weapon again.

“If we’d have met back in Kirkwall, I’d’ve been your ‘questionable company’.”

And in truth, Edric still thought he was, Inquisitor or not. Sure, Varric’s vest wasn’t all white either, but he enjoyed that. It was comfortable not having to hide who he was because Varric knew his kind and must have dealt with them all his life. The Cadash arm of the Carta tried to avoid crossing the Tethras family whenever it was possible and that was Varric’s fault for his talents at information gathering and outmanoeuvring their smugglers. You didn’t do that being a hapless innocent.

“So we match,” Varric said easily.

“Wonder what it would’ve been like, meeting you back in Kirkwall,” Edric mused, leering without shame at Varric pulling himself up onto the bank.

“Maybe we did.”

“And you wouldn’t have given me a second look ‘cause I would’ve just been a Carta thug like all the others,” Edric pointed out, grinning.

“Hey, I’ll have you know I’ve slept with some _very_ disreputable people in my time. Don’t count yourself out.”

Drawing his leather coat over his shoulders, Varric came to join him. After Edric had found his clothes and put them on, they walked up the gently sloping hill to the campsite.

“It’s true, though, it helps to get to know you a bit. You have a very tough shell around that soft kernel,” Varric continued their conversation, after they had walked in silence for a moment.

“I don’t have a soft kernel,” Edric protested.

“A true nug in bronto clothing.” Varric laughed.

“Yeah, go on. I’m gonna show you bronto.”

Since they had reached the camp, Varric answered only with a smirk that seemed to say that Edric was playing exactly into his hands. Edric couldn’t find it in himself to be mad about that. They headed for Edric’s tent all the way at the back.

“I really hate camping,” Varric muttered, as he settled down on the thick blanket that an Inquisition agent must have spread on the ground for Edric. “Who thought it’d be a good idea to sleep on stones and sticks?”

“Been doing that for most of my life. I don’t think I’ve really stayed anywhere for long since I’ve left Orzammar,” Edric said, settling down next to him. “Mattress up in Skyhold’s a bit too soft for me.” He snorted. “Once I actually slept on the floor. Just couldn’t deal with it.”

Varric chuckled. “I can see you’re a true adventurer at heart.”

“Maybe I’d stay in my bed if there was something else in it than too-soft pillows.”

“If that’s an invitation, that’s the least you can do for making me lie down here.”

Varric leaned over, his fingers slipping into the loop of Edric’s belt and Edric felt the cold river water still on Varric’s skin as he grabbed the back of his neck and pulled him down.

They had to be quiet, what with the people still running all over the camp, but it wasn’t the first time Edric had bitten his tongue as he slipped under the blanket with someone. Every quiet gasp and grunt was lost against Varric’s shoulder. Varric had a bit more trouble than he did to hide his pleasure and Edric gleefully enjoyed the half-swallowed noises. He cursed the fact he didn’t have any oil here, but with just Varric’s clever fingers holding their manhoods together, he actually found himself satisfied as long as he could still feel his naked body and kiss him, finally, for as long as he pleased. And here he’d thought he wasn’t a bleeding heart, Edric considered, and couldn’t be bothered by the realisation at all as he ran his hand through Varric’s wet strands and thrusted against his palm.

They laid together afterwards under the thick woollen blanket. Varric hadn’t completely disentangled them yet, his arm across Edric’s chest, their thighs pressed together, and Edric closed his eyes and basked in his warmth and presence.

“I should probably go. They won’t believe I’m just teaching you to read if I stay all night,” Varric muttered, after too short a time.

“Yeah,” Edric admitted, reluctantly. He opened his eyes, looking at the dark roof of the tent for a moment before he rolled on his side and kissed Varric again.

“Dwarf men are the worst. Your beard tickles,” Varric murmured.

“We can’t all be shit at being a dwarf,” Edric gave back, his hand curling around Varric’s arm for a moment before he finally convinced himself to let go.


	14. Chapter 14

Edric made good on his idea and invited Varric up to his room when they were back from the Exalted Plains. Despite its lavish furniture and pretty view, he’d never been able to get much out of the quarters he’d been given, feeling like a nug had to in an Orlesian lady’s handbag. With Varric next to him, however, he began to see the perks. For a couple of hours each night he’d be there talking Inquisition business, making Edric look at the books lining all the walls and slipping under the soft sheets with him when Edric decided he was tired of reading. Afterwards, he fell asleep next to him and left before sunrise which Edric appreciated even if he wouldn’t have minded waking up to him. Though it’d been unspoken, Edric thought neither of them felt like having a chat with all the others about something so fresh and undefined yet and Varric leaving Edric’s chambers with him in the morning would have made them the talk of the Herald’s Rest.

Edric had pulled back to Skyhold for a few days to get some semblance of overview of the Inquisition operations that Josephine, Leliana and Cullen were running for him according to his relatively haphazard orders. It was a much-needed breather for him after the ongoing war they’d stumbled through on the Exalted Plains, with Orlesians fighting each other and the dead descending on the living. Plus, with Varric able to sneak into his room on quiet feet, his mood was improving each day even with the threat of Corypheus still hanging over their heads.

Edric was just on the way back from the Herald’s Rest crossing the main hall towards the advisors’ room when he saw that Varric, at his usual spot, had raised his hand to get his attention. Next to him stood a dwarf woman with her hood drawn into her face. As he approached them, she lifted her cunning eyes to meet his. She was a pretty thing about Varric’s age.

“May I introduce you? This is Edric, our Herald and Inquisitor,” Varric said, with a grand gesture towards Edric. However, despite the showmanship, there were tight lines in his face. When he looked at Edric it seemed to him that there was a flicker of guilt in his eyes.

“And this is Bianca,” he added, looking towards her.

Edric swallowed and tried to keep a blank face as the woman gave him a smile.

*

He’d never heard of a real-life Bianca to go with the bow, and, considering he’d fallen head over heels for Varric, he’d tried to tell himself all sorts of hogwash to convince himself there wasn’t one still around. He’d pretended it was just a secret that Varric kept up for the fun of having a story everyone wanted him to tell where there really wasn’t one. Failing that, he’d hoped that whoever had given their name to Bianca was either some character from one of Varric’s stories, a relative, or dead. Callous as that last bit was, Edric had never claimed to be a good person.

Of course, the truth was everything he didn’t need, as he damn well should’ve known it would be. Bianca was a powerful guild member, a gifted smith, smart, beautiful, and even a fighter if need be, as she proved to them against a small horde of Darkspawn. When he found out that the two had been keeping in contact over letters for years now, Edric felt like someone had kicked him in the stomach.

He knew that Varric owed him nothing, that in truth they hadn’t done more than kiss and fuck a few times and that he would have been annoyed if someone had spun some sort of obligation for himself out of that. But as he watched the two of them walk ahead of him in the caves in the Hinterlands, their conversations only ever half-understandable, full of the sort of hints and innuendos long, close relationships produced, disappointment settled deep in his bones. The only bright spark was that Varric seemed deeply unhappy and weirdly subdued around her, which didn’t exactly point to wedding bells; but it could also mean she still had her hooks deep inside him because obviously Varric still gave a shit.

Through Edric’s own trouble, the idea of living lyrium that had brought Bianca to them just barely reached him. Yeah, it sounded horrifying and as a dwarf, Edric knew the danger of the stuff even when it was nice and blue. However, after seeing the havoc it created in Corypheus’ Templars, he really barely cared why it did what it did, he just knew they had to cut down the ones who were lost to it. Smarter people than him – people like Bianca – would figure out how to get rid of it for good or not. If they did, they could point him in the right direction with a kill order, as usual.

As Varric and Bianca fought about the lyrium in the deep halls of darkspawn-infested territory, Edric stood by in silence until the two quick-tongued dwarves had talked themselves into a stalemate. Varric sighed voicelessly and ran a hand over his face before he turned away, waving away her attempt at calling him to her again.

“You’d better get home before someone misses you,” he said quietly.

Bianca and Edric both watched him walk towards the door, his steps heavy as he joined Sera and the Iron Bull, who were guarding the entrance.

“Get him killed and I’ll feed you your own eyeballs, Inquisitor,” Bianca said, suddenly.

For the sake of Varric or his own pride, Edric had kept his mouth shut so far. Maybe it was just a life-long instinct, too, to traipse behind two higher caste dwarves who seemed to know what they were doing and act like the hired help that he’d pretty much always been. However, the frustration had balled up in the pit of stomach like hot coals in a forge.

“Cut it,” Edric growled quietly. “Who are you to tell me what to do? Trust me, I got a better reason to keep him alive than you do. Don’t you already have a husband?”

The fact that Bianca’s face twisted in something between surprise and didn’t interest Edric anymore. It wasn’t like he actually cared whether she loved her husband or cheated on him with a hundred men – as long as one of them wasn’t Varric. He knew it was probably a bad idea to piss her off, considering the influence she still had on Varric, but if he loved her and not Edric, what did it truly matter?

Edric pulled down the visor of his helmet and joined his people without another word.

*

Varric and Edric didn’t talk on their journey back nor by the next evening, when they were back to Skyhold. For the whole trip, Varric had stayed a few paces behind. After months with the Inquisition, he was a good rider now and Edric had liked to challenge him to short races that Varric would still usually lose, since he was more timid than Edric on horseback, but where he was starting to become serious competition.

However, while his mood had not plummeted to the depths it had reached when Hawke had died – he would still joke with Sera and Iron Bull and talk to Inquisition agents –, Varric didn’t seem to want to talk to Edric and Edric didn’t know what to say to him, either. He was angry and frustrated, but had nothing to point to. Neither did Varric belong to him, nor had anything really happened between Bianca and him aside from a few uncomfortable glances. And wasn’t it just kinda sad that that was enough to break Edric’s stride? He didn’t think he’d realised how deep in he was here yet before he knew he could be out again.

Back in Skyhold, Edric considered asking Varric up to his room, but finally decided that this wasn’t his call. Varric was the one sitting between chairs here, after all, and Edric was still a bit too proud to come begging, even if he was miserable not doing it.

For the first time since he’d known him, he considered leaving Varric behind on a mission, but by this point Edric had gotten so used to having the talented archer at his back that he knew it’d put him danger of getting his head bashed in to change his line-up. Of course, Sera might’ve at least done the job of outfitting the enemy with arrows, but she didn’t like fighting alongside Cole. However, Edric had to take the odd spirit to have him look at a weird spot his agents had found in the Hinterlands where a rift seemed to have torn an even wider gap into the Veil than usual, which left him with little choice.

In the end, he had Varric, Cole and Solas with him as he approached the emerald-green tear crackling with Fade energy located deep inside a mountain. Closing the rift was business as usual (not something Edric had ever thought he’d get used to, but pretty much routine at this point), with just a few demons managing to squeeze through before Edric snapped it shut, but the additional cracks between the worlds were still twitching like lightning over the walls, filling the dark cave with cold, unnatural light.

“There are spirits on the other side that want to get out,” Cole told them, his pale eyes searching the rock walls. “Weaker spirits, but a lot of them. They found this place and worked on it. They are trying to make a way.”

“With the help of your mark, I can repair this,” Solas said, turning to Edric, “but we will see visitors from the other side. Cole, Varric, can you keep them off us?”

“I know more about fighting demons than I ever wanted to,” Varric said, heaving Bianca from his shoulders. “And the kid here is basically in his element with all this Fade crap.”

The affectionate smile Varric gave Cole caught Edric’s attention for a moment. It was always too easy to remember why he liked Varric. He’d even made friends with a spirit.

Solas refocused Edric’s attention when his hands began glowing bright blue. He gestured at Edric, then took his hand, making him extend his arm, a brief reminder of the very first real demon he’d fought – a memory he’d still rather forget. A shiver of power crawled along his bones and emerged through his fingertips, jerking his arm forward so roughly that Edric thought it would be torn from its socket.

There was a hiss and a crack and from the corner of his eyes, he saw a dozen shades pouring out from what seemed like solid rock.

From one moment to the other, Cole vanished from sight, while Varric did a back flip out of a shade’s arm’s reach and fired a bolt the moment he hit the ground. Edric would have watched on, but his arm shook once more and a blinding light filled the air around him and Solas, forcing him to squeeze his eyes shut.

A breathy scream behind him made him open them again, trying to blink through the shimmer the light had left on his vision. Cole was on the ground, but before the shade looming over him could come down, Varric seemed to have appeared all but out of thin air, aiming the short dirk he wore at his belt upwards into its stomach. Cole struggled to his feet and pushed the wounded shade off, but now they were surrounded on two sides by the others rushing in towards the cluster of chaos and noise.

“Are we done here?!” he snapped at Solas, a worried eye kept on Varric and Cole sliding and slipping, like fish in water, around their attackers. They were good, but it would only be a matter of time before one of them took a fist to the face and went down again.

“One more moment.”

The elf’s voice was tight. His body brimmed with the same energy that was cursing through Edric and he wondered briefly where he’d learned any of this. Dorian had some scary stuff he could do, but he was from Tevinter, so that figured. Then again, Edric knew jack shit about elf magic. Maybe they could all do things with the Veil.

When it was over, he felt it because the mark in his hand exploded and then seemed to draw all its energy inwards, staggering him with what seemed like molten lava running down inside his arm. He gasped for air and reflexively tore himself free of Solas’ grasp, but it had been enough. The light seeping through the cracks in the Veil vanished and suddenly they stood in darkness so complete even his dwarven eyes had a hard time seeing anything.

“Shit!” he heard Varric curse.

Behind Edric, the top of Solas staff burst into flame, allowing Edric a view of Varric just noticing a shade had flanked him. Without thinking, Edric threw himself forward onto it. His armour clanked loudly and he shouted without words. Shades, they were dim, he had learned that. They’d go for the obvious target over the one they should be focusing on and Edric could certainly take it.

He swung his sword like a scythe, keeping the shades off him, while bolts and orbs of fire flew overhead at them. He saw Cole appearing out of the shadows like a wraith, slashing backs and limbs.

With Solas’ providing light and Edric there to draw attention, they eventually shredded through the shades. When the last one fell, Edric’s first glance went to Varric, who was already looking at him.

“Thanks,” Varric gasped, out of breath, “I would have hated to die in a cave.”

With the flicker of a smile, Edric nodded his head.

They were making their way through the winding tunnel back to the cave’s entrance, following Solas’ bright staff, when Cole suddenly looked up from the knife he’d been wiping on his ratty shirt and asked Varric: “I don’t understand. Why do you do that?”

“Do what, kid? I need some more words. I do a lot of things people don’t get,” Varric said with indulgent humour.

“You’ve been wanting to say things to Edric, but when you speak to him, you don’t say any of it.”

The expectant smile fell off Varric’s face. He raised his hand, but Cole would not be stopped.

“Why are you unhappy that you feel something that is good?”

“Look, kid, it’s – a little more complicated than that. Maybe we shouldn’t talk about it here-”

“But it seems so clear to me when you are thinking of him so often.”

“ _Later_ ,” Varric said, and the unusual force in his voice finally shut Cole up.

Solas peered briefly over his shoulder, but remained tactfully silent. If he guessed what was going on, he held back the sage advice he was sometimes a bit too eager to dispense. Edric, too, found himself tongue-tied, but only because his heart was racing and he feared that if he opened his mouth, he’d blab more than was good for him.

When they marched on, Varric tapped his shoulder.

“Maybe we need to talk,” he said quietly, “before the kid does it for us in front of a whole tavern full of people.”


	15. Chapter 15

Edric and Varric took the next chance to break away from the Inquisition camp at the lake in the hills west of Fort Connor. They strode along the edges of the water in silence for a while, pebbles crunching under the soles of their boots, looking over the empty, windswept planes underneath where the Templars and mages had fought until Edric had led his people into each of their main bases and uprooted them.

“Whenever I’m here, I think that Hawke would have liked this place. Nothing but woods, steep hills and wild mabari. You know, _basically_ my nightmare, but he was all Ferelden village boy,” Varric said eventually.

“Can’t say I’d have been with him there. Don’t mind it out here as much as you do, but I prefer a place where I can get a drink in walking distance.”

“Good priorities,” Varric answered, glancing at him. “Okay, well. Shall we, before Cole retells our adventures in the tent on the Exalted Plains for the whole team?”

“That little bastard is so creepy,” Edric muttered.

“He’s just a bit different, not actually being human or… anything, really, at this point. You gotta have patience with him. He’s learning.”

Edric felt that they were both stalling, but couldn’t quite break out of it yet. With the wind tearing at his hair and beard, he nodded his head and looked at the skull that was staring out onto the Hinterlands from its place on a short stone pillar.

“You and Bianca,” he said, finally. “What’s going on there?”

“Too much history,” Varric answered. “Almost got married at one point, when we were much younger and more foolish. Threw half of Kirkwall’s dwarven elite into a fit over it. She made the plans for, well, Bianca. She married someone else her family liked more, though. Been sort of meeting up ever since, once a year, sometimes less.”

“Guessing you don’t mean holding hands.”

“The marriage is convenience for both of them,” Varric answered. “I don’t think I was hurting anyone’s feelings, except for pride.”

“Yeah, maybe not theirs,” Edric said, before he could stop himself.

“I didn’t – that’s not why Bianca came by,” Varric said, finally turning fully towards him.

“You sure? ‘Cause she was still acting like you were her property to me.”

“As far as I know, no one’s carved their name in me yet.” Varric took a step closer. “Look, the thing between me and Bianca, it’s always gonna be complicated, but to be honest, it stopped being fun about ten years ago. I don’t even think we truly like each other anymore. It’s pretty much a bad habit by this point.” He took a breath. “If you had any interest in me fixing my affection to someone else, like, say, a handsome Inquisitor, I promise you, you wouldn’t be competing with the shadows of my sordid past. I have a lot of vices, but I _am_ loyal.”

“Yeah, I got that.”

Considering how hard he’d held on to Bianca, who had apparently been married for years and years now, it didn’t seem like inconstancy was one of Varric’s mistakes. He was still so pissed about it all that he only belatedly noticed that Varric had just made him an offer.

“You’d be my – ah, fuck it, my partner? Whatever they call it. You’d not fool around with Bianca or anyone else?”

“No more letters, either, only what needs to be discussed concerning this whole blighted mess with the red lyrium. After all, it’s partly my fault, since she wanted to help my brother. And yes, I’d be your lover, boyfriend, sweetheart… I can find more synonyms.”

“If they’re gonna be that bad, don’t,” Edric said and Varric laughed at him.

“I guess I should just say ‘yes’, then.”

Glancing over his shoulder to make sure that they were still alone between the brambles and fir trees, Edric pulled Varric closer to kiss him on the neck.

“To be honest,” Edric’s hand wandered up into his hair, “I didn’t think you were _that_ interested.”

Varric leaned his head into the palm of Edric’s hand.

“And why wouldn’t I be?”

“Well – I mean, this Bianca, if she weren’t a surfacer she’d be a paragon. And your best friend, he was the Champion of Kirkwall. You got a talent for getting along with people like that, people who aren’t normal. I didn’t know where I’d fit in there.”

“You’re the Inquisitor and the Herald of Andraste – or at least the herald of a spirit making a damn convincing substitute. I would say you are still comfortably above my caste, so to speak. Why do you think I didn’t work up the stones to ask _you_?”

For a moment, Edric stared at him. That Varric would have been _intimidated_ by him seemed completely backwards.

“You kidding me?”

“Often, but not right now.”

“You’ve met me, right? I barely know what’s going on around me here. I’m just some Carta thug.”

“Yes, exactly,” Varric said, grasping his arm. “You’re just some Carta thug who has randomly gotten the fate of Thedas thrust upon him, and not only didn’t you get stupid drunk and fell out a window, you’ve actually been doing alright so far. I mean, we haven’t all been devoured by a crazy ancient Tevinter mage and his pet dragon yet, I’d count that as a win.”

When every day felt like an uphill battle his legs were much too short for, Edric had never quite seen the fact that he was still here as something to be admired. You got a task and then you got to it, if the only other version of the story was that you’d die. It wasn’t really noble.

“You could write better heroes than me.”

“Of course I can, but that’s just because I’m good,” Varric said, bemused. His voice softened a bit. “I can’t write one I like as much as you, though.”

He took Edric’s hand and the way he looked at him, like the world had narrowed down to just Edric at this moment, made Edric’s heart stumble. Still, there was one thing left to discuss.

“I got a condition.”

It seemed like a big one, but Edric was fairly sure he wasn’t being unreasonable.

“I’m a merchant, I know how to deal with those.”

“You gotta either learn to pick up knives or you need to rename that crossbow. It’d be one thing if Bianca were dead or you hadn’t seen her in twenty years or something, but this is… it bothers me, okay? Because it’d keep being ‘Bianca this’ and ‘Bianca that’.”

Though he saw Varric open his mouth briefly, his reflexive noise of protest was swallowed almost whole. He glanced over his shoulder and heaved a sigh.

“You’re right, it would be strange to still carry ‘Bianca’ with me, considering,” he relented. “I’ll think of something, promise. Although close-range is probably not the way to go, I like my teeth too much for that. Is that all?”

“That’s all,” Edric said and dragged Varric down into the short grass with him.

*

“You think Gaspard will do a good job?”

Varric was sipping from an ornamented crystal goblet of wine, his short, stout legs dangling off the balcony’s stone balustrade. With the music and heat wafting out through the open doors of the ball room, it was hard to imagine that half an hour ago they’d been butting heads downstairs with assassins, mercenaries and Gaspard’s own sister. Edric grimaced in response to the question.

“What do I know of Orlesian politics? They all seemed like rat-bastards to me. We saw what Gaspard’s and Celene’s people did on the Exalted Plains. This Briana let her own be massacred by her lover. They’re all as bad as each other.”

“So why Gaspard and not Celene?”

Edric took the goblet from Varric and knocked back the rest of the wine.

“He may be a sneak like the rest, but Celene wasn’t strong enough to keep her thumb on him. The way you told me, what with the ‘Game’ and all, there’s gonna be nobles at her throat all the time, right? Even with Gaspard gone. If she’d kept the throne, we’d probably have been holding her hand against the next attack in a week’s time.” Shrugging his shoulders, he looked out over the neat garden that surrounded the palace, rose bushes cut into intricate shapes lining perfectly straight stone paths. “I don’t know if Gaspard can keep the throne forever since he couldn’t win it alone – can’t rightly say I care, either. Not my business the Orlesians like to make their lives harder switching rulers all the time. I do think he can dig his heels in until this Corypheus thing is over with, though, and that’s all I need. One way or the other… it’s not gonna matter who’s on the throne when Corypheus wins.”

“Let’s try for some more unwarranted optimism and make that ‘ _if_ he wins’, please,” Varric said, slipping off the balustrade.

“You think I did the right thing?” Edric asked, looking at him over his shoulder.

“My knowledge of Orlesian court politics isn’t good enough to say that, either. I think you’re right, though, Gaspard seems like the kind of guy who can hold the reins for a while. Besides, if there’s no coup against him in the next five years, the Orlesians would probably get bored, anyway.”

It seemed like Varric wasn’t just flattering. Feeling like he hadn’t stepped in it for once (as Edric had done _a lot_ this evening, it was honestly a surprise they hadn’t been kicked out), Edric smiled. They stood in silence for a moment.

“Would you care for a dance?” Varric asked.

“I don’t dance, especially not in front of people.”

“So we’ll dance out here,” Varric said, tugging at his wrist. “Come on, live a little, your Inquisitorialness. We have to celebrate you keeping the Orlesian court from an even bloodier ball.”

“Gettin’ the people in the ball room to fight might’ve made the ball more interesting,” Edric muttered and allowed Varric to turn him in a circle. He hadn’t managed to dance properly with Florianne de Chalons, but he could pull Varric chest-to-chest and sway a little and that was enough.

“I thought of a story, by the way.”

“What else is new?”

“I meant a story for Bianca. Well, _not_ Bianca. Asaara.”

“That another one of your girlfriends?” Edric mocked.

Varric rolled his eyes.

“It was the name of the Tal Vashoth woman who gave it to me, but, well, it’s a long tale. She claimed she had found it in an abandoned thaig when she was working as hired muscle for a dwarf – but the adventures she had with it before she gave it to me for a favour are the really interesting part. Now, I wasn’t so keen on revealing her real name before, so that’s how she became Bianca, but now that I’ve gotten a letter that she arrived safely in Antiva I can tell you the _real_ story.”

Edric laughed. “Yeah, that’ll do. Is Bianca gonna be pissed you are hiding that she made the bow?”

To be honest, he never wanted to see the woman again, even if she came by just to fight with Varric.

“Oh, she never wanted that to be known in the first place, since she doesn’t want to build any more of them. It was always more my own fancy. I think I can make Asaara work. The Bull will like it and I can always fit in more of Asaara’s adventures whenever I want, so that should keep people nice and confused.”

“Thanks,” Edric said, moving his feet a little, almost on the beat of the music for once.

“I wasn’t really ever thinking of them as the same thing – person – whatever. But you’re right, it’s better to draw a line under it all. It’s in the past now.”

The music inside swelled and Edric turned with Varric. He was still clumsy and graceless, but Varric was nimbly hopping around his feet, and that made dancing kind of fun, even, if just to watch his body move.

“You’re going to tell me some of those Asaara tales? I know you’ve made up some already. You always do.”

“You know me too well, salroka.”

And Varric began to spin his story while the glow out of the ballroom illuminated them, making his hair gleam gold and his warm brown eyes shine and Edric looked up at the sky he used to fear so much when he’d crawled out of the Orzammar tunnels so many years ago and smiled.


	16. Chapter 16

Kirkwall had recovered from the Chantry explosion like it had recovered from all the catastrophes and strife in its long and colourful history, though Edric guessed that in the homes behind the hastily rebuilt walls it would take a long time to forget those lost. His thoughts only dwelled briefly there, though, more focused on the way Varric lit up as they passed the city gates, trotting on two horses that the Inquisition had gifted them. For the last half hour, Varric had been talking on and on about the people he was going to introduce Edric to and the places he had to see.

“I’ve been to Kirkwall before,” Edric had reminded him.

“You’ve been _through_ here, but you don’t really _know_ Kirkwall,” Varric had answered with a boastful grin.

They dismounted as Varric led them up the steep streets into Hightown, where the crowds grew thicker and dodging people on horseback became difficult. On his visits, Edric had spent most of his time in the lower parts of the city and, as Varric let his gaze sweep over the sloping rooftops, he looked like that was the way he actually wanted to go.

“You don’t live in Hightown, right?” Edric asked. Varric had told him he had bought a house there, but whenever Varric had come to visit Edric in Skyhold, it seemed to him from his stories that he spent most his time in a small apartment he owned down in Lowtown.

“Not when I can avoid it. Hightown’s a bit far away from where the real action is, but you do need some form of representation – even if only a couple of servants and my imaginary business-owning uncles live there. Considering that Bartrand isn’t around to pick up the slack in that department of the family, I don’t have much of a choice but to show up every once in a while. Besides, it’s closer to work now.” Reaching up to pat his horse’s neck, Varric pulled the animal further along between two rows of market stands. “What about you?” he asked Edric with a sly smile.

“Don’t know. Probably gotta find myself a tavern, unless there’s anyone kind enough to take me in. Think someone’s got a room for an old, crippled duster?” he asked.

They had never really talked about whether Edric would stay with Varric now that he had passed on control of the Inquisition to Cassandra, but only because they didn’t have to. Edric knew that the only place for him was at Varric’s side, whether in Hightown or Lowtown. It was about time they’d stay together someplace. Varric had been going back and forth between Skyhold and Kirkwall for two years now. However, since he’d been made Viscount, he hadn’t had the freedom to travel much anymore and Edric had noticed his absence like a missing limb – a feeling he could now pretty damn accurately describe, thanks to Solas’ battlefield operation.

“Such a poor soul sounds like someone the state should take care of,” Varric said, grinning at Edric. “Although I wonder what’s going to happen to the Inquisition now that you’ve left. You’ve been the figurehead.”

“Cassandra’s gonna do good. The Inquisition was a Seeker thing to begin with.”

“Aren’t you going to miss being in charge, though?”

“Of that monster? No. ‘sides, I _am_ gonna be in charge, right?”

When Varric had told Edric that if he wanted to come to Kirkwall, there was a position as head guard and enforcer opening in House Tethras, Edric had jumped on it even though he’d known Varric was joking. His Cadash family members had never cared enough about him to command his loyalty, but Varric most certainly did. Eventually they’d decided he’d be leading charges against people threatening Varric’s trading routes, do official business on the viscount’s behalf, and make sure the assassins Varric got courtesy of the Merchant’s Guild and distinguished nobles with ambitions to the throne wouldn’t get further than the front door.

“You know, I’ve told you this before, but I’m not going to put you to work if you don’t want to do it. I still have the family business and it turns out they pay the Viscount alright. I could _probably_ support another duster. Especially now that you’re an arm short you don’t have to...”

With a grunt, Edric wiped the offer away, waving his remaining hand.

“I can’t just sit on my ass all day.”

After three years as the Inquisitor, Edric had been glad as a nug in a mud puddle to pass the burden on to someone else, but he’d also gotten used to the pressure. Besides, he’d worked all his life, from when he was a kid on. If he just stayed at home spending Varric’s money, he’d feel right useless. He’d met people who fought with less limbs than he had now, besides.

“It’s just that I’ve almost watched you die about three dozen times now and I’m not getting used to the sight,” Varric said.

“If I’ve survived until this point, I’m not dying anytime soon,” Edric said, although he wasn’t half as confident in that as he pretended to be. Seemed like he always got away just so, with more luck than he deserved. Didn’t change his opinion, though.

“Alright, alright. Don’t let me insult your dwarven honour,” Varric answered, rolling his eyes. “Still, you deserve a break, salroka.”

“I deserve to finally see you play viscount. Still pissed I missed your coronation getting stuck in that thaig.”

“You just want to do me on my throne,” Varric joked. “You told me when you were drunk.”

“That too.”

*

After introducing him to the Captain of the Guard, Varric led Edric down the long throne room. The high walls reminded Edric of the ancient dwarven ruins that he had sometimes tumbled into as a dirty duster brat crawling through the tunnels to earn his keep. Now he was walking by the side of the viscount of one of the mightiest cities in the Free Marches and people who saw his scarred, branded face and the missing arm recognised him at once, stared at him and spoke in hushed voiced.

“Always feels a bit strange being in here. The last viscount’s head was lobbed off by the qunari and I’ve been told it rolled the length of the hall,” Varric said, striding before him. “Might just be a good story. It certainly stuck with me.”

“No one’s gonna touch your neck as long as I’m around,” Edric answered.

When Varric approached the throne, a young elf woman shot forward and handed him the crown and a small stack of letters with a bow, telling him Bran had arranged for visitors to come in the afternoon. Before she scampered away again, her gaze briefly touched Edric, awed.

“Of course Bran would make me do work the moment I come in,” Varric sighed.

“Gimme the letters and put that crown on,” Edric said, taking them from him before Varric had time to answer. “I gotta take it in.”

“It looks just slightly ridiculous,” Varric cautioned as he stepped towards the throne and put the golden circle on his head before sitting down in the stone chair.

“Missing your own throne yet, Inquisitor?” he asked, sinking against the high back.

“Not a bit,” Edric said and couldn’t stop a smile. The very first time he’d seen Varric up there in the frozen mountains, with his golden earrings and fancy tunic and beaming smile, Edric had already thought he looked the part of the merchant prince; now he had all the accessories to match. “I think I like it better standing right next to the big chair,” he added, moving to his side as he idly leafed through the letters Varric had gotten. Even he recognised a few names – bigwigs from all across the Marches.

“Should be helpful. With the Inquisitor as my bodyguard, I’d be surprised to get many delegates mouthing off to me anymore,” Varric said. “Especially since you look so fierce.”

“Yeah, you like it.” Edric halted. “There’s a letter from Cassandra.”

“Yeah? What’s it say? Does she want to arrest me again?”

Edric broke the seal and unfolded the paper. He was a quick reader by this point. Whenever Varric had visited, he’d brought Edric new books with lots of sex and violence, the kind Edric liked; and he’d even let him take a peek at the chapters of a book that he himself was writing, against Edric’s protests, about the Inquisition.

“She says she has news of Solas’ agents in Kirkwall,” he said.

Slumping against the arm of Varric’s throne, Edric told himself that he didn’t care, but that was a lie. There wasn’t gonna be any growing old and grey with Varric if Solas ripped the Veil up and killed them all in favour of his dead elves from ages past.

Leaning over his shoulder, Varric scanned the letter as well.

“We should look into it,” he said. “Not the regular guard, though, or just Aveline. It’s too sensitive. I might go myself. Could need some experienced back-up.”

Though Edric had been happy to leave Skyhold behind, he felt a twinge of excitement. He was still convinced he’d never been meant to be the Inquisitor, the Herald, or any of that crap; he’d never wanted that damn throne. But he’d gotten pretty good at the whole heroics thing and once you’d swung your sword for a good cause for a few years, the feeling got addictive.

He pressed a kiss on Varric’s mouth.

“Just tell me when we’re heading out,” he said.


End file.
